Honest answers, ahead of you needing them.

A parachain is a chain that lives inside a larger network — Vitreus, in our case. The larger network handles the heavy-duty parts (security, finality, validator economics) so your chain doesn't have to. Your chain just does its own thing and inherits the rest.

In other words: you focus on what makes your chain interesting, the Vitreus relay handles the boring-but-hard cryptographic bits underneath.

Helpful, not required. ChainForge generates the boilerplate that intimidates most newcomers — the macros, the module wiring, the type plumbing — and your AI agent handles most of the day-to-day typing.

You'll still want to read the code you ship. Treat Rust like SQL: you can shepherd a project to production without writing it from scratch, but you need to be able to follow what's happening when something breaks.

Private by default. Always. You explicitly opt in to listing your project in the Gallery, and even then you can choose between "public read-only" and "public + forkable".

ChainForge stores: your email, the form inputs you used to scaffold, and the metadata you optionally publish. We don't store the code itself once we've generated and handed it to you — that lives on your machine.

ChainForge itself is free while we're still shipping the early milestones. The costs you do hit aren't ours:

• ▸Your AI agent subscription (Claude, Cursor, etc.) — you pay your usual rate, we don't middleman it.
• ▸Testnet gas — free on Vitreus testnet, with a Foundation-run faucet.
• ▸Mainnet, when you graduate to it — that's a real-money decision and well outside M1.

We'll be transparent about pricing if and when it changes. The success criteria we've set ourselves is "under $100/month of platform infrastructure", so any future pricing will be modest.

We could have built a generic Substrate-builder tool. We didn't. Generic tools already exist and they're not the bottleneck — what's missing is the chain-specific knowledge: which pallets are canonical for this chain, what the conventions are, where the foot-guns hide.

Being opinionated about Vitreus lets us be helpful in ways a generic tool can't. The Foundation reviews accuracy on the outputs, so what you ship is what the chain accepts.

It keeps running. Your parachain lives on Vitreus testnet (and eventually mainnet), not on our infrastructure. Your code is on your machine. ChainForge is in the path while you're building, and out of the path the moment you deploy.

Put differently: ChainForge is the software you build with. Your chain is what you keep.

A few paths, in increasing order of formality:

• ▸The validator's suggested fixes catch most issues in the code before they ship.
• ▸The Q&A index (M9) lets you search community answers from the platform — and from inside your AI agent.
• ▸The deploy walkthrough explains failures in Vitreus-specific terms when they happen.
• ▸Beyond that: the Foundation's community channels. Real humans, real answers.

Vitreus is. ChainForge will be — once the early milestones stabilise and the shape of the project stops shifting weekly. For now we want to ship cleanly and decide on the right licence and contribution model once it's clear what shape this takes.