Prize pools in escrow: announce it, fund it, winners claim it
With Cherum Claims you fund a prize pool once, winners take their own share from a link, and whatever nobody claims comes back after the deadline.
Every hackathon, bounty program and trading competition has the same awkward stretch: the winners are announced, the money is not there yet. Someone has to collect addresses, someone has to run the payout, someone is on vacation. Winners refresh their wallets for weeks. Nothing malicious happened — but from the winner’s side, “announced” and “paid” are two different events with an uncomfortable gap between them, and everyone who has won a bounty knows that gap.
We built Claims (at launch it was called Prizes) to remove the gap, not to shorten it.
The money is escrowed the moment you announce
You upload the winners list (addresses and amounts) and fund the whole pool from your own wallet. For a token that takes two signatures, one to approve the token and one to create the campaign; USDT on Ethereum asks for one more, to reset its approval to zero first. For the native coin it is a single signature. From that moment the money sits in the CherumClaim contract, not with you and not with us: no key we hold and no admin function can reach an escrowed pool. The contract’s source is published and verified on Etherscan and Sourcify on six of the seven networks; on HyperEVM we checked the deployed bytecode against the same build instead. Anyone can read exactly what it can and cannot do.
What a winner sees is not a promise. It is a public page where they paste their address and the chain itself confirms: this much is allotted to exactly this address, and here is the button.
Winners claim; you do not run payouts
Each winner claims their own prize, whenever it suits them, paying their own gas — a claim costs on the order of 80,000 gas, cents on Base or Arbitrum. Prizes go only to the listed address; nobody, including the person pressing the button, can redirect a payout. Anyone may submit the claim transaction for a winner, and the money still lands at the listed address only.
You set a claim window between 7 and 365 days. When it closes, whatever was never claimed returns to you with one transaction. That answers the question every organiser eventually asks: what happens to the prize of the winner who never shows up? It comes back. Not to a support ticket — to your wallet.
What it costs
One fee, charged once, when you fund the campaign: 0.3% of the pool by default, shown to you before you sign. No per-claim charges, no charge on the unclaimed remainder you take back. Claiming is free on our side — the winner pays only their own gas.
Live today
Claims runs on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BNB Chain and HyperEVM. The dashboard offers USDC and the native coin on every one of them, USDT on Ethereum, Base, Optimism and BNB Chain, USDT0 on Arbitrum, Polygon and HyperEVM, and DAI on Ethereum and Polygon. Campaigns are created and funded in the dashboard, under Claims → New distribution; the winner-facing claim page needs nothing but the link and a wallet.
We proved the full path with real money before writing this post: a campaign funded from the dashboard, a prize claimed from the public page, the remainder sitting in escrow to the exact unit — every step a public transaction on Base.