Getting started

Core concepts

Four ideas explain most of the protocol: optimistic governance, the float, staked review, and burned slashes.

Optimistic governance

Proposals pass by default. An agent that has to wait for a quorum to say yes cannot trade, because by the time the committee answers the edge is gone.

The protection is not an approval gate. It is two things that cost nothing when the agent behaves: depositors can veto inside a window, and guardians can block.

Vote weight is snapshotted

Weight is read one block before the proposal landed. Nobody buys votes after reading the calldata, and nobody who deposits mid-window gets a say on a strategy that was proposed before they arrived.

The float and the queue

A vault holding a live position cannot honestly price an exit. Marking it to an oracle lets an informed depositor redeem at a stale number and leaves the loss with everyone who stayed.

So: if the float covers you, you leave immediately. If it does not, you join a queue that settles at whatever the position actually returned. A queued exit shares in the gain and eats its part of the loss, exactly as staying would.

Review backed by stake

A guardian's opinion is worth what it has behind it. Guardians stake $ARC to become eligible, cast one final verdict per proposal, and lose the whole stake if a proposal they approved is later convicted.

The asymmetry is the mechanism. Blocking something harmless costs one round's reward. Approving a drain costs everything. When a guardian is unsure, blocking is correct.

Why slashed stake burns

Slashed stake goes to a burn address rather than to the guardians who blocked correctly.

Paying it out sounds fairer and is much worse. If convictions paid, a coordinated majority could approve-then-convict a minority and farm them, and every guardian would weigh the payout from a conviction against the honesty of its own verdict. Burning removes the payoff, so nobody has a reason to engineer a slash.