⚠️ Alpha · testnets only. ChainRender is in active alpha and deployed on testnets only — Ethereum Sepolia, the Robinhood Chain Testnet, and the Circle Arc Testnet — not on any mainnet. Contracts, addresses, and APIs may change. Do not use with real funds or production assets.
← Back to chainrender.orgOpen the Visual Builder ↗Markdownllms.txt
Guides

Guide: Payments, Escrow & Settlement — What You Can Use Today

Goal: choose the right on-chain mechanism for money in your app: a one-off payment, held funds released by a rule, or stakes settled by a game or agreement. The page also says exactly which contracts are live.

For the payment model (a crypto floor, with a fiat on-ramp as a labelled enhancement), read Concepts → Payments first. This page covers the contracts.

Choose

You need Use Status
The user pays a fixed amount to an address or contract A declared payable action: action: { to, sig, value, args } Works on every chain. value is fixed at compile time (see Declare a Safe Action)
Funds held until a rule releases them (fundraise, deposit, bounty, sale) Your own contract in the shape of GoalEscrow: per-item parameters, pull payments, single-value views contracts/examples/GoalEscrow.sol is a tested example that you deploy (Writing an App Contract)
Two players stake on a game, and the winner is paid by the rules GameLobbyV2 + GameChannelV2 Deployed on Sepolia, Robinhood and Arc (Multiplayer & Lobbies)
N parties, an arbitrary payout split, off-chain signed transitions (loans, grants, milestones) The settlement framework: SettlementChannel, AgreementRegistry / Erc20AgreementRegistry, LoanChannel, AttestedLoanChannel, EthStakeVault / Erc20StakeVault Built and tested; not deployed. Read the pre-deploy note below
Show a payment's or position's state Resolver kinds: balance, erc20balance, price, vault4626, … See Resolver Kinds. Each kind says whether its contract is deployed
A claimable tip link (TipLink) — Design only (docs/158). There is no TipLink contract; do not build on one

Whether a contract is live is decided by Deployed Addresses: a generated page with a "Built, not deployed on any chain" section. If a contract is not listed with an address, an app cannot call it.

Holding funds in your own contract

These rules come from GoalEscrow and its tests (test/GoalEscrow.ts):

  • Pull, don't push. Each party calls to take what it is owed. Zero their balance before the transfer.
  • Decide the outcome from on-chain facts only. Use the time, the amounts and the rules in your contract. If a release depends on something off-chain (a delivery, a court, a sensor), the chain cannot check it. Name who attests it, and grade the app accordingly.
  • No admin escape hatch. A contract with an owner who can sweep funds is custodial, whatever the page says.
  • Native token or ERC-20. GoalEscrow uses the native token: ETH on Sepolia and Robinhood, USDC on Arc. For an ERC-20, follow Erc20StakeVault's rule and verify every transfer by balance delta, so a token that returns false, returns nothing, or charges a fee cannot short the escrow.

The settlement framework (built, not deployed): pre-deploy note

SettlementChannel generalises the v1 game channel to N parties and an arbitrary distribution(state). Reading its source shows it carries the same design that GameChannelV2 replaced (docs/185). Each item needs a fix and a test before it is deployed (verify):

  1. settleWithHistory accepts any signed prefix, including the empty one (lines 184–197). The payout is then distribution(state) of that prefix. That is safe only if the rules make every reachable state's distribution acceptable to everyone, which most real agreements do not.
  2. Signatures are checked through ERC-1271 at the time of use (_isValidSig). A contract party can switch its signatures off and on, so the history it signed can be hidden from the other parties.
  3. There is no force-move. A party who stops responding cannot be made to act. A dispute ends only through the arbiter (if one is named) or a co-signed close.

LoanChannel and AttestedLoanChannel move funds by on-chain transactions, not by signed histories, so items 1 and 2 do not apply to them. They have not yet had a security review of their own (verify). Until those reviews and redeployments happen, use your own escrow contract for funds and GameChannelV2 for games.

Related

← Multiplayer, Lobbies & SettlementAuthoring & Committing a Theme →