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Fund your account: the Wallet & Vault

Your Halo balance lives in an on-chain vault on Base. Learn how to deposit USDC in the Wallet dialog, how spending works, Free vs Reserved, and how to withdraw.

VaultWalletPayments

Everything you spend on Halo flows through your vault — an on-chain USDC escrow on Base. You manage it in the Wallet dialog (open it from the wallet pill in the header). Deposit once, and every prompt and tool draws from that balance automatically — no wallet popup per message.

Halo is in alpha on Base mainnet with real USDC.

Wallet

Funds you put here pay for prompts and tools automatically — no popup per message.

Inference balance
Total$42.50
Free$38.10
Reserved$4.40
Free — spendable now Reserved — held for prompts in flight, returns to Free

$1.20 in expired reservations can be reclaimed to Free.

Reclaim
Deposit Withdraw
Amount (USDC) · wallet $50.00
5USDC
$1 $5 $10
Deposit $5.00
Illustration — the Wallet dialog

What you need

  • A wallet on Base (an EVM browser wallet).
  • USDC on Base mainnet — the money you spend on inference and tools.
  • A little ETH on Base — only to pay gas when you deposit or withdraw. You don’t sign or pay gas on individual prompts.

Reading your balance

The Wallet shows your Inference balance as three numbers:

  • Total — everything in the vault.
  • Free — available to spend or withdraw.
  • Reserved — temporarily held for prompts in flight. When a request settles for less than was set aside, the remainder returns to Free automatically.

How to deposit

  1. Open the Wallet dialog and pick the Deposit tab.
  2. Enter an amount of USDC (there are quick presets like $1 / $5 / $10).
  3. Confirm. Your first deposit needs a one-time USDC approval (two popups), and it also sets up a session key so every later payment is popup-free. After that, deposits are a single confirmation.

A per-wallet deposit cap is shown in the dialog during alpha.

Once the deposit confirms, your balance is funded and you can start prompting — Halo spends against it as you go, billing the actual tokens each request uses.

How to withdraw

Withdrawals are timelocked — a short delay that stops funds being pulled out from under an operator who’s mid-request. It’s a two-step flow:

  1. In the Withdraw tab, choose Request withdrawal.
  2. Wait for the countdown to unlock, then reopen the Wallet and Withdraw the amount (a Max button fills in your full Free balance).

Only your Free balance is withdrawable — Reserved funds unlock once their holds clear. Expired reservations can be returned to Free with Reclaim when any are available. Deposit, request, and withdraw are transactions your main wallet signs, so each uses that small bit of ETH for gas.

About the session key

The one-time session key the first deposit creates is a small key your browser holds that approves payments for you — so your main wallet isn’t asked on every prompt. It can never move funds out of your main wallet; it only authorizes spending against your vault balance.