Lock your money where a bad night can't reach it.

Blocking the sites doesn't move the money

Most tools built for gambling harm work on access. Self-exclusion schemes stop operators from accepting your bets. Blocking software like Gamban or BetBlocker filters gambling domains at the device level. A bank-level gambling block declines transactions coded to gambling merchants. All of these are worth using, and all of them work on the same principle: put distance between you and the point of sale.

What none of them do is change the fact that the money is still there, liquid, one tap away, in an account designed from the ground up to make spending frictionless. Every layer of protection sits between you and the bet. No layer sits between you and the balance.

That matters because relapse is rarely a considered decision made at a desk. It happens at a specific hour, in a specific mood, with a specific number visible on a phone screen. Protection that depends on you making a good choice in that exact moment is protection at its weakest point — and a block you installed while sober can be uninstalled by the same person twenty minutes later.

What Apsis actually does

You choose an amount and a date. The money leaves your bank once and is held as USDC in a vault on Base that belongs to you alone. Until the date you chose, the contract holding it will not release it — to you, to Apsis, or to anyone. There is no support line that opens it early, because there is no function in the contract that could.

Before any of that becomes final, a ten-minute cooling-off window runs. Cancel in the first minute and no money has moved at all. Cancel in the remaining nine and the contract refunds you automatically. The window exists precisely so the decision to lock can be reversed while it is still a decision — and so that after it closes, it genuinely isn't one.

On the date you set, the balance converts back to dollars and lands in the one bank account you verified at signup, with whatever interest it earned while it sat there. Not to a card, not to a new account, not anywhere you could redirect it in a bad week.

Why “I'll just move it to savings” stops working

Almost everyone tries this first, and for most people it is the right answer. It fails in one specific case: when the person you are protecting the money from is you, and you also hold the transfer button. A savings account is a labelled container, not a constraint. Moving money out of it takes about forty seconds and requires nobody's permission.

The behavioural economics literature has a name for the alternative — a commitment device: a choice made in a calm moment that deliberately removes options from your future self. The classic study is a Philippine bank's SEED account, where savers who voluntarily gave up access to their own deposits until a chosen date ended up with markedly higher balances than an otherwise identical control group. The mechanism was not motivation or education. It was the removal of the withdrawal option.

Apsis is that idea with the enforcement moved from a bank's policy into a contract. A bank that promises not to let you withdraw early is making a promise it could break, be argued out of, or change in its terms. Code that has no early-release function has nothing to break.

Where it fits alongside everything else

Recovery tooling works in layers, and money is only one of them. A reasonable stack looks like this:

• Support first. A counsellor, a peer group, or the National Problem Gambling Helpline. Nothing below this line substitutes for it.
• Self-exclusion with the operators and venues you actually use, so accounts cannot be reopened on impulse.
• A bank-level gambling block where your bank offers one — these decline transactions at the merchant-category level and often carry a deliberate cooling-off period before they can be switched off again.
• Device-level blocking — Gamban, BetBlocker and similar, ideally installed with someone else holding the uninstall password.
• A commitment device for the surplus. This is the layer Apsis occupies: the money above your day-to-day float, put somewhere reaching it isn't a matter of willpower.

The last layer is the one most people skip, usually because the only available version of it is asking a family member to hold the money — which works, but puts another person in the position of having to refuse you, earns nothing while it sits there, and depends on that relationship holding up.

Questions people ask before their first lock