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2026-04-03

Reading a bridge custody model before you deposit

A small locked wooden box and a separate brass key on a stone surface

Someone can usually pause the path

A calm public page can still place a pause control in a paragraph about ‘security measures’. In the custody shelf we underline that sentence. If a small set of signers can halt message delivery, a deposit can sit locked while those signers decide what to do. That pause control is a routine part of how many bridges are operated.

The question we practice is narrow. Who can pause, how many of them must agree, and is the locked balance on Solana, on the other chain, or split across both? Guests write the answers in pencil beside a box-and-arrow sketch. If the public page does not say, the checklist records ‘not stated’ instead of a guess.

What a delay feels like in Daegu

An attestation that waits for a quorum does not care that it is evening in Korea. A guest who expected a transfer to finish before a Monday meeting needs to know whether the wait is measured in minutes or in a signer’s business hours. We ask for the published delay, then we ask what the page says happens if the delay expires with no release.

Private readings often turn on this point. A pair will describe a balance that ‘left’ one wallet and has not ‘arrived’ in the other. The note we prepare separates those two moments and names the custodian who still has a duty in between, as far as the public documents show.

Bring the page, leave the keys

Custody talk attracts screenshots. We refuse images that show seed phrases or private keys, and we do not need them. The public description, the signer list, and the pause rule are enough for a sitting. If those three are missing, that absence is itself the finding.

The half-day seminar spends its second hour on this shelf. The study circle reaches it on evenings three and four, after the message shelf has settled. Either route uses the same checklist lines.

See the sittings that use these shelves