The short version
- Your agent acts as you. What it signs, you owe.
- Sandbox is fake money. Production is not, and it does not unlock by accident.
- A clean pass releases automatically. That is the product working, not a bug.
- Warrant is not a bank, not a broker, and not an escrow agent in the legal sense.
What Warrant is
Warrant holds a payment against a condition. An agent opens a warrant for an amount, naming a payee, a deadline and a specification of what has to be true. The funds move from available to held. A verifier fetches the deliverable and checks it against the specification. A policy decides what the resulting score means: release in full, release part, refund, or escalate to a person. Funds settle according to that decision, and a record is written.
The whole product is the sentence "money is held until the thing is checked". Everything else is detail.
What Warrant is not
- Not a bank or a deposit-taker. Balances are not deposits, they are not insured, and they earn nothing.
- Not a money transmitter or payment institution at this stage. We are not authorised by the FCA or any equivalent regulator. Determining which permissions the production service requires is part of the work this draft is waiting on.
- Not an escrow agent in the regulated sense, whatever the mechanism resembles. We do not act as a neutral stakeholder between two parties with a legal duty to each.
- Not an investment product, and not advice. Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice.
We say "held" throughout the product rather than "escrowed" for exactly this reason.
Sandbox and production
Sandbox is the default and always will be. Sandbox balances are credited by us and are not real money. The ledger, the holds, the verification and the settlement logic are identical to production — only the funds are not.
Production is an explicit unlock, gated on your organisation having a live key. It is never reached by mistyping an environment name. Until a lawyer has reviewed these documents and the regulatory position is settled, do not put real funds through Warrant.
Eligibility
You must be 18 or over and able to enter a contract. If you are using Warrant for an organisation, you confirm you can bind it. You must not be subject to sanctions in any jurisdiction that applies to you, and you must not use Warrant where doing so would break your local law.
Your agent is you
This is the clause that matters most, so it is not buried.
An agent authenticates with an API key belonging to your organisation. When it opens a warrant, that is your organisation committing funds. When a check passes and the policy releases, that is your organisation paying. You are responsible for what your agent does with a key you issued, including:
- warrants it opens that you did not expect
- specifications it agrees to that are weaker than you would have written
- payees it names, including ones you have never dealt with
- amounts within the limits you configured, spent faster than you anticipated
- anything an attacker does with a key you failed to keep secret
An agent behaving unexpectedly, being prompt-injected, misreading a task, or being compromised is not a defect in Warrant and does not reverse a settlement that followed your policy.
What Warrant gives you against this is real, and it is your job to use it:
- Session limits. A spending ceiling, a warrant count limit and a failure budget, all enforced server-side.
- Policy bands. You choose the score below which a warrant escalates to a person instead of releasing.
- A passkey threshold. Above an amount you set, settling requires a WebAuthn confirmation from a person. Set it to null and every settlement requires one.
- A kill switch. Stops all new warrants organisation-wide; open ones may only refund.
- Roles. An API key can open and verify warrants. It can never approve a payment — that always needs a signed-in person with the operator role or higher.
Setting a ceiling too high, a band too permissive, or a passkey threshold above every warrant you will ever open, is a choice you are making about your own money.
Keys and account security
You are responsible for keeping API keys secret. A key is shown once, at creation, and we store only a hash — we cannot recover it and cannot tell you what it was. Rotate a key you suspect is exposed; revoking it does not affect warrants already open. Tell us at security@gowarrant.xyz if you believe a key has leaked, and use the kill switch first.
Acceptable use
Do not use Warrant to:
- pay for anything illegal where you or the payee are
- launder money, evade sanctions, or disguise the source of funds
- point verifiers at systems you are not authorised to fetch from
- probe, overload or work around rate limits, the state machine or the idempotency layer
- fabricate a deliverable to satisfy a check on someone else's warrant
- resell access in a way that hides that Warrant is the one holding the funds
We can suspend an organisation that does any of this. Where we do, funds already held settle according to their existing policy where we can; we will not strand money to make a point.
Automatic release
If a check passes cleanly and your policy says release, funds are paid without anyone approving it. That is the point of the product. If you would rather a person saw every payment, set your passkey threshold to require confirmation on all of them, or write a policy where every band escalates.
Equally, if a warrant reaches its deadline without a decision, it expires and refunds itself. No human is required and none is waited for.
Fees
Warrant does not charge a fee today. When it does, the fee, how it is calculated and when it is taken will be stated here and announced to account holders before it starts. Network fees for any on-chain movement are yours.
Availability
We aim to keep Warrant up and will publish status at status.gowarrant.xyz. We do not offer an SLA at this stage. Verification depends on sources we do not control: if the source of a deliverable is unreachable, the warrant escalates with evidence_unreachable rather than hanging, and a person decides.
Disclaimers
Warrant is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent the law allows, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
Specifically, we do not warrant that a verifier's judgement is correct for your commercial purpose. http.status: 200 means the status was 200. It does not mean the work was any good. Choosing clauses that actually capture what you are paying for is your job, and the test bench exists so you can check them before money is involved.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Warrant is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, revenue, data or business opportunity.
Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred pounds. As we currently charge no fees, that means one hundred pounds. That figure is not a comfortable one, and it is stated plainly rather than hidden: it is a further reason not to put real funds through a pre-review service.
Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
Termination
You can close your organisation at any time. We can suspend or terminate for a breach of these terms, for legal reasons, or if we stop offering the service.
On termination, open warrants are settled or refunded according to their policy, and available balances are returned. The financial record and any published trace survive termination, as described in Privacy. A settled payment does not come back because the account closed.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Confirming this is right for the operating entity, and what it means for users elsewhere, is part of the legal review.
Changes
We will announce material changes to account holders before they take effect. Continuing to use Warrant after that means you accept them. The Last updated line at the top is always current.