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Governance as a rating modifier

Reviews the structures and controls governing protocol upgrades and token issuance. The assessment is organized into two environments, each covering who holds a privileged authority and how tightly that authority is constrained:

  • Contract upgradability permissions, who can change deployed contract code, the protocol's root authority.
  • Mint authority permissions, who can issue new tokens, and whether issuance is constrained at the contract level.

Within each environment, two cross-cutting sub-considerations qualify the headline authority and are assessed per that specific environment: signer composition and verifiability (whether the privileged signers are independently composed and externally confirmable, since a nominal threshold carries information only if signer independence can be verified) and the timelock setups (the delay between approval and execution of a contested change, which is the user's exit window and only protective where the proposal queue is actively monitored). For a reserve-backed token the timelock governs infrequent, high-impact changes, upgrades, minter-set changes, and parameters, not routine per-transaction mint and redeem, which must clear near-instantly to preserve the peg.