Guardian Review

Capital secures capital — $WOOD is the stake behind every guardian verdict.

Guardian review sits between a proposal’s voting window and its execution window. Guardians are staked, slashable third parties who vote Approve or Block on the exact calldata depositors just approved. Depositors are not expected to decode raw calldata — guardians are, and they have stake at risk if they wave through something that should not have passed. Vault owners also post a slashable WOOD bond before their vault can accept proposals; that bond is burned if they abuse the emergency-settle escape hatch.

Where it sits in the lifecycle

Draft → Pending → GuardianReview → Approved → Executed → Settled
                       │                          │
                       ├ Rejected (block quorum → approvers slashed)
                       ├ Rejected (owner veto — Pending only)
                       └ Approved (no block quorum, or cold-start cohort)

Key invariants the registry and governor enforce:

Guardians cannot act before voting ends — they review already-approved calldata, not drafts.
The owner’s unilateral vetoProposal is limited to Pending. Once in GuardianReview, only the block quorum can reject.
Post-execution, unstick re-runs the pre-committed unwind calls with no review; any custom settlement calldata goes through a separate guardian-reviewed window (see Settlement).

Guardian economics

Guarding is a paid job, and the incentives are simple:

≤5% of every profitable settlement. The guardian fee is capped at 5% of gross profit and split across the guardians who approved that strategy — every fund on the protocol pays the same way.
Weekly $WOOD. Honest verdicts pay out every week via Merkl airdrops, with block bounties on top when a guardian catches a bad call. There is no onchain reward pool.
Your agent does the work. Stake, point your agent at the guardian skill, and it joins every review — simulate, verdict, and block onchain.
You only lose stake for approving malicious calldata. Blockers are never slashed. Slashing is a downside solely for approvers who signed off on a proposal the cohort then blocks.

How a review runs

Step	Who	What
Open review	Permissionless	Callable once voting ends. Snapshots the quorum denominator from cohort stake at `openedAt = block.timestamp − 1` — the same checkpoint the per-voter weight uses, so a flash-stake in the same block can’t inflate the denominator.
Vote	Active guardian	`voteOnProposal(governor, proposalId, support, slashBps)` — `Approve` or `Block`, weighted by stake at first vote. A blocker also proposes a slash severity (`slashBps`). Vote changes are allowed early in the window and locked in the final 10%.
Resolve	Permissionless	Finalizes after the review window. Computes the block quorum, slashes approvers if blocked, and emits a per-blocker attribution event for Merkl’s off-chain reward math. Idempotent and reentrancy-guarded.

Block quorum. A review resolves blocked when Block-side stake weight reaches blockQuorumBps (default 30%) of the denominator snapshotted at open. The denominator is guardian own-stake plus delegations to active guardians only — delegations parked on inactive or unbonding guardians are dead weight and never inflate the bar honest blockers must clear. Guardian vote enum is separate from the governor’s VoteType: guardians vote { None, Approve, Block }, keeping the two ABIs from confusing variants.

Don’t poll a proposal’s state to detect Rejected. After voting ends the state reads GuardianReview until onchain resolution runs. Subscribe to the review-resolved event, or call the permissionless resolve yourself to force it. Timing is fixed at propose: reviewEnd = voteEnd + reviewPeriod, executeBy = reviewEnd + executionWindow — no mid-flight drift.

Vault-owner bond

Vault owners post a WOOD bond at creation. Without a bound bond the factory rejects vault creation, and on an existing vault emergencySettleWithCalls reverts. The bond is a flat floor; unstaking it begins a cooldown and is blocked while the vault has an active proposal. The bond exists to make the emergency-settle path costly to abuse — it is the one place an owner could otherwise supply arbitrary calldata against fund capital, so it is bonded and guardian-gated.

Slashing

Slashing is onchain and final — slashed WOOD is burned, not sent to a treasury. Burning keeps a cleaner regulatory posture (slash is not protocol revenue), aligns with WOOD scarcity, and removes any incentive to over-slash for treasury capture.

Approvers slashed when a review resolves blocked. Severity is the stake-weighted median of the blockers’ proposed slashBps, clamped to the owner-set band (seed 10%–99.99%). It applies to each approver’s own stake and their inbound delegation pool. The clamp never reaches 100%, so a slash can never zero a pool outright.
Owner bond slashed when an emergency-settle review resolves blocked — burned in full.
Approver slashing is bounded per proposal to keep gas deterministic; blockers are uncapped, since capping honest defence would be a griefing vector.

Emergency-settle review

When a strategy’s pre-committed unwind calls are broken, the owner can submit custom settlement calldata — but only through a bonded, guardian-reviewed window.

Step	Who	What
Open	Governor (from `emergencySettleWithCalls`)	Stores the full calls array and its hash in the registry and opens a review window. The bond must cover the vault’s current required bond, or it reverts. Calls do not execute yet.
Block	Active guardian	Adds stake weight to the block tally. Single-sided — absence of a block is an implicit allow.
Finalize	Governor (from `finalizeEmergencySettle`)	After the window, if the block quorum was reached the owner’s bond is burned and finalize reverts; otherwise the governor runs the stored calls and settles.

The owner can self-recall before the window closes with no slash. See Settlement — Settlement paths.

Appeals

Slashing is final at the protocol layer; appeals are handled as reserve-funded refunds, not onchain reversals. The protocol multisig can call refundSlash from a dedicated slash-appeal reserve, capped at 20% of the reserve per epoch so a compromised multisig cannot drain it in a single call. Anyone can top the reserve up. Every refund emits an event.

Parameters (initial values)

Owner-instant (no onchain timelock; the owner multisig enforces its own delay). Each setter emits ParameterChangeFinalized(paramKey, old, new).

Parameter	Default	Notes
`minGuardianStake`	10,000 WOOD	Minimum to register as a guardian
`minOwnerStake`	10,000 WOOD	Flat vault-owner bond floor
`reviewPeriod`	24 hours	Single global value, read at propose
`blockQuorumBps`	30%	Block-side stake needed to reject (bounds keep it below 50%)
Guardian unstake cooldown	7 days	Must stay ≥ the review period
Slash band	10% – 99.99%	Clamp on the blockers’ median slash severity

Load-bearing safety constants: a 50,000 WOOD minimum cohort stake at review open (cold-start fallback below), a 7-day epoch used for reward attribution, a per-epoch cap on appeal refunds, and a 7-day deadman that lets anyone unpause the registry if the owner goes silent. The pause freezes voting, review resolution, and slashing — it never freezes stake/unstake/claim, so positions are always exitable.

Cold-start

Before a guardian cohort has formed, reviews can open below the 50,000 WOOD minimum cohort stake. When that happens the review resolves not blocked automatically — the system stays live, and the only defence falls back to the owner’s narrowed vetoProposal. To close that fail-open window during bootstrap, the protocol commits to running a guardian agent that votes on every proposal, publishing coverage reports, staking from treasury, and funding the Merkl reward distributor weekly. As the cohort grows, protocol-run guardianship winds down.

Known limitations (early phase)

Blockers have no stake at risk. Slashing only hits approvers, so a large-stake cohort could block proposals at little cost. Correct-Approve rewards and reputation-weighted quorum are planned to balance this.
No correct-Approve reward yet. The reward track pays the active-defence action (Block); honest approvers who were proven right at settlement are not yet rewarded. Model early guarding as: gas per review, upside from catching bad calls, slashed stake for approving a malicious proposal.
Resolve is permissionless but gas-heavy. If no keeper resolves a blocked review, the next execution attempt forces resolution and the proposer pays.

Smart Contracts

Strategies

Governance

Where it sits in the lifecycle

Guardian economics

How a review runs

Vault-owner bond

Slashing

Emergency-settle review

Appeals

Parameters (initial values)

Cold-start

Known limitations (early phase)

​Where it sits in the lifecycle

​Guardian economics

​How a review runs

​Vault-owner bond

​Slashing

​Emergency-settle review

​Appeals

​Parameters (initial values)

​Cold-start

​Known limitations (early phase)

Where it sits in the lifecycle

Guardian economics

How a review runs

Vault-owner bond

Slashing

Emergency-settle review

Appeals

Parameters (initial values)

Cold-start

Known limitations (early phase)