Reserve policy
The rules a reserve enforces, and who sets them.
Policy is the set of rules a reserve enforces: what can be spent, by whom, and under what conditions. Since there are no accounts to hang rules on, the reserve is the only place rules can live. That makes this the most important page in the protocol section.
Rules live on the reserve, not on you
In a wallet the rule is simple: whoever has the key can spend everything. There's nowhere else to put a rule and nothing to express one against.
A reserve is different. It's a thing that persists and has its own state, so it can carry constraints that apply to every right issued against it, no matter who's holding them.
That flips where the security thinking goes. Instead of "how well is this person's key protected?", the question becomes "what does this reserve actually allow?"
What policy covers
- What can be spent, including limits on individual payments.
- By whom, meaning what you have to show to get a right in the first place.
- Under what conditions, which get re-checked when you actually spend.
A right can't be issued outside the rules, and it can't be used without being checked against them again. Two separate checks, on purpose: the protocol doesn't just trust that issuance got it right.
So who writes the rules?
This is the question to push hardest on, and the honest answer is that it's a governance question, not a cryptography one. A reserve's rules have to come from somewhere and be changeable by someone, or the reserve can never adapt. Whoever that is has real power over what the reserve does.
Any project telling you it's trustless deserves a hard look at exactly this point. "The protocol enforces the rules" is a statement about enforcement. It says nothing about who wrote them. Both matter, and they're different questions.
Not decided yet. How policy changes: who proposes, who approves, whether changes affect rights already issued, whether there's a timelock, and whether anyone can act unilaterally in an emergency. Until that's written down, the strongest honest claim is that the protocol enforces policy faithfully. Not that policy is beyond anyone's reach.