Skip to content
~/sultan
Chapter 6 crest
Chapter 6 · § 6.3 · Recipe

The Warrant Model

Warrants attach to regulated counterparties, not to the protocol.

By · Originally published April 2026 · Next review October 2026 · ~5 min

Problem

How does the system support lawful disclosure under court order, given that the protocol itself does not have a master key or a warrant interface?

Solution

Warrants attach to regulated counterparties, not to the protocol.

Warrants attach to regulated counterparties (exchanges, custody desks, funds, banks operating on the protocol), not to the protocol itself. The counterparty has, off-protocol, KYC and identity records for the accounts it serves. When a warrant arrives, the counterparty produces those records and uses its existing relationship with the account holder to extract on-protocol view keys for the slice the warrant covers.

The protocol does not have a warrant interface. The protocol does not need one. The regulator's existing warrant power against regulated counterparties produces the disclosure the regulator needs.

Discussion

This is the same model existing financial regulation operates under. The bank knows who its customers are. The regulator subpoenas the bank, not the dollar. StableZK preserves this structure. The thing that changes is the disclosure surface for non-warranted activity, which collapses to default privacy.

△ Warning This model relies on regulated counterparties being the venue through which holders interact with the protocol for non-trivial activity. It does not, and cannot, prevent self-custody from existing. Self-custody is a fact of cryptocurrency. The regulatory architecture is built so that the regulator's enforcement tools work against the regulated venues, where the bulk of activity happens, with self-custody users covered through the same general legal framework that already applies to cash.

See Also

❦ ❦ ❦