Wallet Policy

Overview

Policies can specify who may initiate, approve, sign, administer, and reconcile activity; which destinations and contracts are allowed; and how backups, incidents, and changes are handled. Rules may be documented, platform-configured, or enforced by smart contracts.

Written policy offers little protection when it differs from actual permissions or signing authority. One administrator may bypass limits, contract upgrades can replace rules, and vague requirements can produce inconsistent approvals. Excessive restrictions can also encourage informal workarounds.

Organizations should define scope, owners, delegated limits, review frequency, emergency powers, evidence, and exception handling. Requirements should map to enforceable technical controls near signing where possible. Changes need approval, testing, versioning, and alerts. Exceptions require rationale, compensating controls, and expiry. Periodic review should confirm actual wallet behavior matches policy intent.

Wallet Policy should be distinguished from the asset balance and from the application that displays it. For example, a customer-facing success message does not prove that the intended transaction executed on the correct network; operations should verify execution and reconcile the result before irreversible fulfillment.

Records for Wallet Policy should preserve account and address identifiers, asset and network identity, policy version, requester, approvers, signed payload or transaction reference, fees, timestamps, status history, confirmations, exceptions, and final balance and accounting effects. For Wallet Policy, corrections must remain linked rather than overwrite the original event.

Production ownership for Wallet Policy should identify the user or legal entity, supported assets and networks, address model, custody boundary, signing authority, recovery method, and systems permitted to request or observe transactions. For Wallet Policy, these fields determine who can act and which evidence is authoritative.