Governance

Invariants first. Process second.

The Foundation does not vote the protocol into being able to move money, relax a deny, or widen a delegated scope. Those are architectural invariants. Everything else goes through a documented proposal in the public repository.

Constitutional invariants

• Fail-closed validation. Unknown, unsigned, or expired authority is a deny.
• Deny outranks payment. A valid payment intent cannot override a policy deny.
• Delegation only narrows. A delegate cannot grant more than it holds.
• No floating-point arithmetic in the protocol.
• The engine never custodies funds or settles value.

Ordinary amendment cannot relax these. If a change requires an exception path, it does not belong in EXOCHAIN.

Proposal lifecycle

1. Draft and public commentary in the repository.
2. Review against the invariants.
3. Ratification with a cooldown.
4. Activation behind a feature flag, then a release.

The living documents and traceability matrix are in governance/ of the source tree. The project site keeps a short public summary.

Separation of roles

The Foundation stewards license, marks, and disclosure. Implementers run nodes, issue evidence, and operate hosted services under their own responsibility. Apache-2.0 does not transfer those operational duties to the Foundation, and the Foundation does not claim them.

This page describes current practice. It is not a bylaw, a board resolution, or a claim of any particular corporate or tax form.