How the vault works

An item has a home chain (where it was minted) and, at any moment, one active chain where the usable copy lives.

1. Lock. The owner transfers the item into the vault contract on the active chain, paying the 0.69 USDC vault fee and the messaging fee. The vault holds it under its code; no Unvault key can withdraw it. The vault, escrow and mirror contracts on every chain are owned by UV Tech Foundation.
2. Message. The vault emits a cross-chain message through the messaging protocol naming the collection, token ID and beneficial owner.
3. Mirror. The destination chain's contract mints (first arrival) or releases (subsequent arrivals) the mirror item to the beneficial owner.
4. Unvault. Moving back locks or burns the mirror and releases the original at home. Moving between two non-home chains routes according to the collection's configuration.

Invariants#

• Exactly one transferable copy across all chains, except during an in-flight move when there may be none.
• Locked originals are non-transferable; only a delivered message releases them.
• Creator earnings and transfer rules apply on every chain according to that chain's contract.

Failure handling#

Delivery can fail after the lock is confirmed (out of gas on the destination, protocol pause, unsupported route). The item then shows in_transit or stuck in GET /vault/status. Most failures are recoverable by retrying execution on the destination; the tracking link on each move shows whether a retry is available. See Integrating vault status.

Patent#

The protocol is the subject of pending patent applications (PCT/US25/55750; U.S. Provisional 63/985,753). Public interfaces are documented; internals are not.