the fee token
The fuel for quantum-resistant protection
Every protected action is paid in WINTER: the vault contract will not accept a protected signature without its WINTER fee. No token, no protected transaction.
What the contract enforces
The vault factory takes the creation fee in the same transaction that makes your vault, or it makes nothing.
Your vault pays the fee from its protection credit before your action runs, or the action does not run. You sign the most you are willing to pay.
Escape, evacuate, recovery and cancelling a recovery never charge a WINTER fee and never even read the fee contract. If WINTER could not be bought at all, you could still leave.
The app converts ETH to the WINTER a fee needs in the same step, and anything above the fee stays in your vault as protection credit.
Where every fee goes
Half of every fee is burned on chain, for good.
The other half grows a public bounty for anyone who can break today's wallet cryptography. No cap: it grows with every vault and every action.
Fixed in WINTER, forever: 1,000 WINTER to create, 50 WINTER per action, half of every fee burned and half added to the public canary bounty. The split happens in the same transaction as the payment and nobody can change it. No share goes to anyone else. The fee never changes in WINTER; what it costs in other currencies moves with the WINTER market price, up or down.
Set once at launch, locked forever after
Wintergate's contracts go live before WINTER does. Until then, vaults and protected actions are free.
- A single-use launch key, made for this one job, names WINTER and its price pool, once.
- The contract checks the token and pool on chain before it accepts them.
- The setting then locks. The key has no power anywhere and is destroyed.
- From that moment every vault pays the fee, whenever it was made.
- Touch your funds. It has no path to any vault's money.
- Stop an exit. Exits never read the fee contract.
- Change anything later. It works once, then never again.
- Change the fee amounts or the split. Those are fixed at deployment.
The WINTER address will be on this site once WINTER launches, and the vault contracts themselves name it on chain. Any other token sold as WINTER is not the real one, and no vault will accept it.
What WINTER is, and what it is not
- The fee the vault contract charges for a protected action.
- The currency of the canary bounty.
- A fixed supply token on Ethereum.
- Part of the cryptography. The hash signature is made on your device and would verify without any token.
- An investment, a share or a claim on anyone.
- Needed to leave. Exits are always free of WINTER.
Read the risk disclosures before you buy or hold any WINTER. Not offered in restricted regions.