Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these Terms

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and Chest Gate (“Chest,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). They govern your access to and use of the chest.sh website, the Chest Gate dashboard, the hosted facilitator at gate.chest.sh, the Chest CLI when used in connection with our hosted services, and any other product, feature, or service that we operate (collectively, the “Service”).

By accessing or using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you may not access or use the Service.

2. Eligibility

You may use the Service only if you are at least 18 years old and have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract. You represent and warrant that (a) you are not a person barred from using the Service under any applicable law; (b) you are not located in, organised under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in any country, region, or jurisdiction that is the target of comprehensive sanctions administered by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) under the Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011 (Cth) or the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945 (Cth), or by the United Nations Security Council; and (c) you are not designated on, or owned or controlled by a person designated on, the DFAT Consolidated List, the United Nations Consolidated List, or any equivalent restricted-party list maintained by an applicable sanctions authority (including, where relevant to your use of the Service, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List).

3. Description of the Service

Chest Gate is a payment-routing protocol for paid APIs. The Service offers two delivery modes:

• Self-hosted (open source). The Chest proxy and CLI are released under an open-source license. When you self-host the proxy on your own infrastructure, your use of that software is governed by the open-source license that ships with the source code. We do not provide service obligations, warranties, or support for self-hosted deployments under these Terms unless you have a separate signed agreement with us.
• Hosted (cloud). The hosted facilitator at gate.chest.sh, the dashboard, the registry, and related hosted components are operated by us and are subject to these Terms in full. Use of the hosted Service is subject to fees as described in Section 7.

The Service routes paid API calls between merchants (API providers), referrers (agents that route traffic), and the Chest protocol, and executes splits via an Anchor program on the Solana blockchain. We do not act as a broker, dealer, money transmitter, exchange, custodian, or financial institution, and the Service is not a wallet or a custodial product.

4. Accounts and authentication

To use most of the Service you must create an account through our authentication provider. You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information and to keep that information up to date. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account, for safeguarding your credentials, and for any wallet, device, or session that can authorize actions on your behalf. Notify us immediately at chest.sh/contact if you suspect any unauthorized use.

5. Self-custody, wallets, and on-chain risk

Chest is a self-custody service. You control the private keys that authorize transactions made by you or on your behalf. We do not custody, control, or have access to the cryptocurrency in your wallet, and we cannot reverse, cancel, refund, or recover transactions once they are broadcast.

You acknowledge and accept that:

• cryptocurrency, blockchain protocols, smart contracts, and decentralized applications are novel, experimental, and carry risks of total loss, including from bugs, exploits, network outages, validator failures, governance changes, hard forks, regulatory action, and changes in market value;
• on-chain transactions are public, permanent, and irreversible, and the existence of a relationship between specific wallet addresses can be observed by anyone;
• loss or compromise of your private key, recovery phrase, or any authorized device will likely result in irrevocable loss of access to your funds;
• the Solana network and its surrounding ecosystem are operated by third parties we do not control; downtime, congestion, fee spikes, or other network behaviour can prevent or delay settlement.

6. Acceptable use

You agree that you will not use the Service to:

• violate any applicable law, regulation, or third-party right, including export controls, sanctions, intellectual property, privacy, securities, gambling, financial services, healthcare, consumer protection, or anti-money-laundering laws;
• gate or distribute content or APIs that are illegal, infringing, fraudulent, deceptive, defamatory, obscene, sexually explicit involving minors, or that promote violence, self-harm, discrimination, or terrorism;
• publish a Gate that wraps, proxies, or otherwise resells access to a third-party API unless you (a) own the underlying API, or (b) hold a written license, redistribution agreement, or reseller authorization from its operator that permits the access pattern you implement. By publishing a Gate you warrant, on a continuing basis, that you hold all rights and authorizations required to operate that Gate; you are solely liable for any breach of an upstream provider’s terms;
• interfere with, disrupt, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to any part of the Service, our systems, our network, or to another user, including by stress-testing, vulnerability scanning, denial-of-service activity, scraping outside published rate limits, or misrepresenting your identity;
• forge, spoof, or otherwise misrepresent attribution headers, including by claiming credit for traffic you did not originate or routing artificial traffic to inflate referrer earnings;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source of any non-public component of the Service except to the extent such restriction is prohibited by applicable law;
• use the Service to launder funds, evade sanctions, finance terrorism, or facilitate any other prohibited financial activity;
• use the Service in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair the Service or interfere with any other party’s use.

We may suspend, restrict, or terminate access to the Service at any time and without notice if we determine, in our reasonable discretion, that you have violated these Terms or that suspension is necessary to protect the Service, our users, or third parties.

7. Fees, payment, and protocol take

The hosted Service charges a protocol fee, currently set to one and one-half percent (1.5%) of each paid call routed through the hosted facilitator and settled on-chain. The protocol fee is enforced by the on-chain program and applies regardless of the merchant’s configured pricing. Self-hosted deployments do not pay a protocol fee but are not entitled to any service from us in connection with such use.

All settlement is denominated in USDC on Solana. You are responsible for any network fees, gas fees, slippage, and other on-chain costs associated with your transactions, except where we have explicitly agreed to cover them.

We may, at our discretion, change pricing, introduce new fees, or modify the structure of the protocol take at any time. We will provide reasonable advance notice of material changes to fees that affect existing users. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the change.

All fees are non-refundable except where required by applicable law.

8. Referrers and attribution

Referrers earn the commission rate set by the merchant for the relevant deployment, currently routed atomically to the referrer wallet identified by a valid signed attribution header at the time of settlement. We do not guarantee any specific commission rate, volume of attributed traffic, or earnings level. Referrer commissions are paid directly on-chain and are not invoiced or held by us.

You agree not to forge, spoof, replay, or otherwise tamper with attribution data, and to use only attribution methods documented in our referrer guide.

9. Merchants and content responsibility

If you deploy a gate, you represent and warrant that you have all rights necessary to expose the underlying API or content through the Service, that the API does not violate the rights of any third party, and that you will respond promptly to any complaint or notice of infringement directed to that gate.

You are solely responsible for the API behind your gate, including the legality of its content, your compliance with terms imposed by upstream providers, the accuracy of any data returned, and any claims by users of that API. We have no obligation to monitor or review API content, and we disclaim all liability for it.

10. Intellectual property

The Service, including all software, designs, logos, content, and documentation we create (excluding open-source components subject to their respective licenses and excluding User Content as defined below), is owned by us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual-property laws. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service in accordance with these Terms.

You retain ownership of any data, code, configuration, content, or other materials that you submit to or generate through the Service (“User Content”). By submitting User Content, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, process, transmit, display, and otherwise use that User Content as necessary to operate, secure, and improve the Service, and to comply with legal obligations.

You agree to comply with all third-party licenses applicable to any open-source software that ships with the Service, including the license accompanying the Chest proxy source code.

10.1 DMCA notices

If you believe content available through the Service infringes your copyright, send a written notice that complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to chest.sh/contact. We reserve the right to remove allegedly infringing content and to terminate the access of repeat infringers.

11. Feedback

If you submit ideas, suggestions, or feedback about the Service, you grant us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use, modify, and exploit that feedback for any purpose without obligation to you.

12. Beta features and previews

We may make pre-release features available on a trial, early-access, or beta basis. These features are provided “as is” and may be changed, suspended, or removed at any time without notice. Beta features are not subject to any service-level commitment.

13. Third-party services

The Service may interoperate with third-party software, services, or networks (including the Solana blockchain, RPC providers, wallet providers, authentication providers, and upstream APIs). Your use of those third-party services is governed by the terms of those third parties, and we are not responsible for their actions, omissions, downtime, or content.

14. Australian Consumer Law

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any guarantee, right, or remedy that you have under the Australian Consumer Law (Schedule 2 to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010(Cth)) or any other consumer-protection law that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted, or modified (collectively, the “Non-Excludable Rights”). The disclaimers, exclusions, and limitations in Section 15 and Section 16 apply only to the extent permitted by law and do not limit any Non-Excludable Right.

To the extent the Service is supplied to you as a consumer within the meaning of the Australian Consumer Law and we are entitled to limit our liability for breach of a Non-Excludable Right (other than a guarantee as to title, undisturbed possession, or undisclosed securities), our liability for that breach is limited, at our option, to: (a) re-supplying the Service or paying the cost of having the Service re-supplied; or (b) where the Service consists of goods, replacing the goods, supplying equivalent goods, or paying the cost of replacement or equivalent supply.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

SUBJECT TO YOUR NON-EXCLUDABLE RIGHTS AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, FREE OF ERRORS, FREE OF VULNERABILITIES OR HARMFUL COMPONENTS, OR THAT IT WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS; THAT TRANSACTIONS WILL SETTLE WITHIN ANY PARTICULAR TIMEFRAME OR AT ALL; THAT THE SOLANA NETWORK OR ANY OTHER BLOCKCHAIN, RPC PROVIDER, WALLET, OR ORACLE WILL FUNCTION AS EXPECTED; OR THAT INFORMATION OBTAINED THROUGH THE SERVICE WILL BE ACCURATE, RELIABLE, COMPLETE, OR CURRENT.

WE DO NOT PROVIDE FINANCIAL, INVESTMENT, LEGAL, ACCOUNTING, OR TAX ADVICE. NOTHING IN THE SERVICE IS A RECOMMENDATION TO BUY, SELL, OR HOLD ANY ASSET.

16. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL CHEST, ITS AFFILIATES, OR ANY OF ITS OR THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST SAVINGS, LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF GOODWILL, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, OR THE COST OF SUBSTITUTE SERVICES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR ACCESS TO OR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO ACCESS OR USE, THE SERVICE, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

SUBJECT TO YOUR NON-EXCLUDABLE RIGHTS AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) ONE HUNDRED AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS (AUD 100) OR (B) THE TOTAL FEES YOU PAID TO US FOR THE SERVICE DURING THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. THESE LIMITATIONS APPLY REGARDLESS OF THE LEGAL THEORY ON WHICH THE CLAIM IS BASED, INCLUDING CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, AND STATUTE.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so some of the above limitations may not apply to you. To the extent we may not, as a matter of law, disclaim any implied warranty or limit liability, the scope and duration of such warranty and the extent of our liability will be the minimum permitted under applicable law.

17. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Chest, its affiliates, and its and their respective officers, directors, employees, agents, and licensors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs, arising out of or in any way connected with (a) your access to or use of the Service; (b) your User Content or any API or content gated through the Service by you; (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law; or (d) your violation of any right of any third party.

We reserve the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter for which you are required to indemnify us, and you agree to cooperate with our defense of those claims.

18. Taxes

You are solely responsible for determining what taxes, duties, levies, or similar amounts apply to your use of the Service or to any earnings or transactions you receive through the Service, and for collecting, reporting, and remitting the correct amount to the appropriate authority. We do not provide tax advice, and the protocol fee and any earnings reported in the dashboard are provided for operational convenience only. Australian users should note that GST may apply to certain supplies; you are responsible for any GST that arises in connection with your use of the Service unless we have invoiced it separately.

19. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend, restrict, or terminate your access to the Service, your account, or any feature, in whole or in part, at any time with or without notice, for any reason or no reason, including for actual or suspected violations of these Terms, fraud, abuse, security concerns, requests by law enforcement or regulators, or where continued operation poses an unacceptable risk to us or third parties.

On termination, your right to access and use the Service ceases immediately. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including ownership, fees accrued before termination, warranty disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law, and dispute resolution) will survive.

20. Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Victoria, Australia. The parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria, Australia and the federal courts of Australia sitting in Victoria, except as set out in Section 20.1. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

20.1 Informal resolution first

Before commencing any formal proceeding, the parties will attempt in good faith to resolve any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service (a “Dispute”) by written notice sent through chest.sh/contact and a follow-up discussion within thirty (30) days.

20.2 Arbitration

If a Dispute is not resolved informally, and except for (a) applications for urgent injunctive or equitable relief; (b) claims regarding intellectual-property rights; (c) consumer claims that you are entitled by law to bring in a court or tribunal of competent jurisdiction (including the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal or any equivalent forum); and (d) claims that may be brought in a small-claims jurisdiction, the Dispute will be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration administered by the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration (ACICA) in accordance with the ACICA Arbitration Rules then in force. The seat of arbitration will be Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the language will be English, and the tribunal will consist of one arbitrator. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

20.3 Individual claims

TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, YOU AND CHEST AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING DISPUTES AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY AND NOT AS A REPRESENTATIVE PARTY OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED REPRESENTATIVE OR CLASS PROCEEDING. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims by more than one person and may not preside over any form of representative or class proceeding. This Section does not limit any right you may have under Part IVA of the Federal Court of Australia Act 1976 (Cth) or any other statutory right to participate in a representative proceeding that cannot lawfully be waived. If this Section is found to be unenforceable as to a Dispute, the entirety of Section 20.2 is null and void as to that Dispute, and the Dispute will proceed in court.

21. Changes to the Terms

We may modify these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, we will provide notice through the Service or by another appropriate means. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page indicates when the Terms were most recently revised. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree to the revised Terms, you must stop using the Service.

22. Force majeure

We will not be liable for any delay or failure to perform our obligations under these Terms to the extent that the delay or failure is caused by an event beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, war, terrorism, riots, civil unrest, government action, labour disputes, internet or utility outages, blockchain network outages or hard forks, or third-party service-provider failures.

23. Notices

We may provide notices to you by email to the address associated with your account, by posting in the Service, or by any other reasonable means. Notices to us must be sent to chest.sh/contact.

24. General

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any other terms expressly incorporated by reference, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements on that subject. Our failure to enforce any right or provision of these Terms is not a waiver of that right or provision. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect, and the invalid provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable while preserving its intent. You may not assign or transfer these Terms, by operation of law or otherwise, without our prior written consent; any attempted assignment without consent is void. We may freely assign these Terms. There are no third-party beneficiaries to these Terms. The headings in these Terms are for convenience only and have no legal effect.

25. Contact

Questions about these Terms can be sent to chest.sh/contact.