On Life Support Adoption registry
Abandoned canisters kept from deletion at minimum cost, so a project or community can claim them and bring them back.
Preserved canisters
Candidates: frozen right now
Cost = the canister's idle (storage) burn plus one 0.0001 ICP ledger fee per refill, shown as cycles, ICP, and USD at 2.1337 XDR per ICP (cycles minting canister, Sep 21, 2026) and 1.36 USD per XDR (from our ICP price). 1 T cycles always costs 1 XDR, so the cycles figure is the stable one.
Audit log
How life support works
Preservation, not restoration. A frozen canister burns only its idle storage cost. If the balance reaches zero the canister is uninstalled and its state is deleted. Life support sends small top-ups so the balance stays above zero but below the freezing threshold. The canister stays frozen on purpose, which is the cheapest state in which it still exists.
Sized per canister. Each top-up targets at most 45% of that canister's own freezing threshold, computed from a certified reading of its idle burn and threshold setting. Even if a top-up were applied twice it could not unfreeze the canister. State is verified after every top-up, and anything unexpected stops all spending automatically until a person has looked.
Hard limits. A global spend cap, a budget per canister, a manual kill switch, and an append-only audit log of every top-up, published above. The limits are enforced by the database itself, not only by code.
Running canisters are never funded. If someone else tops a preserved canister up past its threshold, life support steps back and flags it.
Adopting a canister
If you are the original team, or a community that wants to revive a project, get in touch. Adoption means the existing controllers (or the SNS, for DAO-controlled canisters) take funding back over. ICPWatch never takes control of a canister: top-ups are permissionless deposits and nothing more.