The Entity That Stewards The Protocol
SWSS Foundation is the parent of the SWSS group, registered in the British Virgin Islands. It holds the protocol, the standards and the intellectual property, and it carries the administrative authority that every SWSS property authenticates against.
The Protocol And Its Standards
SWSS Chain, the DEED-1 settlement standard and the identity layer specification.
Intellectual Property
The copyright across every SWSS property, and the marks the ecosystem publishes under.
The Foundation Reserve
14% of supply, held and released by contract against a published schedule.
Administrative Authority
The sessions that gate every administrative surface across the ecosystem.
swss://why-a-foundationstructureWhy A Foundation At All
A settlement network has to outlive the commercial arrangements around it
The parties who build a network, the clients who first use it and the companies who sell against it all change. The record it keeps has to survive each of those changes without renegotiation, so the protocol, the standards and the intellectual property sit in the parent entity rather than in the trading company.
The boundary also makes authority explicit. Control over a protocol surface is held in one place and granted deliberately, rather than accumulating wherever a team happened to need access.
Foundation And Fintech
Two legal entities carry the group's four offices, and they are not interchangeable. The Foundation holds what must outlive any commercial arrangement. The operating company carries the business, the licence and the client relationships. Knowing which one a counterparty is dealing with is the first question any serious agreement answers.
SWSS Foundation
Parent And Steward
- The SWSS Chain protocol and its specification
- The DEED-1 settlement standard
- Copyright across every SWSS property
- The Foundation Reserve, held by contract
- Administrative authority over protocol surfaces
SWSS Fintech
Operating Company
- Enterprise engineering delivery across six divisions
- Regulated payment operations under the MSB registration
- Commercial agreements with clients and counterparties
- Institutional relationships in the United Kingdom and Europe
- Revenue, and the obligations that come with it
14 Percent, Held By Contract
The Foundation Reserve is 14 percent of a supply fixed at genesis. It exists to fund long term protocol stewardship: the specification, the standards, the security work and the engineering that keeps a settlement layer usable across decades rather than quarters.
It is held and released by contract against a schedule published in the white paper. That is the material point. A reserve controlled by discretion is a promise; a reserve controlled by contract is a constraint, and it binds the Foundation exactly as it binds everybody else.
The reserve is not the only allocation with a stewardship purpose. The table beside this paragraph shows the four buckets that fund protocol work, each with its own schedule and each counted inside the same fixed supply.
Stewardship Allocations
of 5B SWSSEach bucket is released by contract against a published schedule. No allocation can be moved by instruction, including the Foundation's own.
Foundation Authority, As It Actually Runs
Authority described in prose is a claim. Authority described as a mechanism can be tested. Each record below names the thing that enforces it, and three of them are running in production as you read this.
swss://foundation-authority4 recordsAdministrative Sessions
Every administrative surface in the ecosystem authenticates against a Foundation session issued by SWSS IVL and verified locally, alongside the property's own path token. Neither alone opens anything.
note A missing or invalid credential returns 404 rather than 401, so a denied state cannot be distinguished from a route that does not exist
Validator Anchoring
The validator set is Foundation anchored while remaining open to operators who meet the published requirements. Who may produce a block is decided in one place and recorded, rather than emerging from whoever arrives first.
note Anchoring is a starting condition, not a permanent one. The direction of travel is set out further down this page
Permissioned Access Approvals
Access to the permissioned documentation surface requires business verification and Foundation approval, so the parties reading integration detail are parties the ecosystem can identify.
note Approval governs access to documentation, never to funds or to a member's holdings
Published Facts
The versions, counts and parameters every SWSS property displays are published from one source under Foundation stewardship and synchronised from the running networks on a schedule.
note A published version once sat five releases behind the chain for fifty four days. The schedule exists because of that
What The Foundation Does Not Do
What an entity cannot do is more informative than what it intends to do. The first is a structural fact; the second is a statement of intent, and only one of them survives a change of management.
A prohibition published by the party it restrains is worth nothing on its own. Every limit here names what enforces it, in a system the Foundation does not control alone.
Holds No Member Funds
The Foundation operates no custody. Member balances, staking positions and treasury movement are SWSS App's domain, under an identity SWSS IVL established. The Foundation has no position anywhere in that path.
enforced by SWSS App · separate codebaseSigns Nothing On A Member's Behalf
Signing authority belongs to the identity layer and is exercised only on the member's approval. No Foundation credential authorises a transfer of value belonging to somebody else.
enforced by SWSS IVL · signing authorityCannot Move An Allocation Alone
Supply allocations are held and released by contract against a published schedule. Changing one runs through governance on the record, not through an instruction from the parent entity.
enforced by smart contract · published scheduleDoes Not Set Protocol Parameters By Itself
Parameter changes, validator set rules and treasury decisions are governance matters. Stewardship means maintaining the specification and the mechanism, not deciding them unilaterally.
enforced by on chain governanceGrants No Access To Holdings
Foundation approval governs administrative surfaces and permissioned documentation. It never reaches a member's funds, and no administrative session can be escalated into one that does.
enforced by FoundationGate · scope boundaryMakes No Offer Of Any Kind
Nothing published by the Foundation constitutes an offer, a solicitation or investment advice, and no return, yield or appreciation is promised or implied anywhere in the ecosystem.
enforced by published policy · counsel reviewedWhat Stewardship Means In Practice
Stewardship is an easy word to publish and a hard one to evidence. These four are the obligations the Foundation actually carries, each one visible in something already published or already running.
The Specification Is Maintained, Not Owned Privately
The protocol specification, the DEED-1 settlement standard and the identity layer definition are published in full. Stewardship means keeping them current, versioned and public, so that anyone building against them is reading the same document the network runs on.
Security Work Is Funded Before It Is Needed
A dedicated security allocation exists in the published supply table so that audits, bounties and incident response capacity do not compete with product delivery for budget. Security that has to ask for money arrives late.
Builders Are Funded From A Published Allocation
The developer allocation funds grants, tooling and the documentation surface developers work from. It is a published bucket with a published schedule rather than a discretionary pot, which is what allows a builder to plan against it.
Changes Run Through Governance, On The Record
Allocation changes, protocol parameters and validator set rules are governance matters. The Foundation maintains the mechanism and the record; it does not decide them by instruction.
The Foundation Is One Authority, Not The Only One
Four authorities own four domains, and no authority owns two. Read the grid by column: every domain has exactly one filled cell, and that is the property the ecosystem is built to keep.
| Authority | Identity who a party is | Custody moving what is held | Asset Records DEED-1 instruments | Block Production the validator set |
|---|---|---|---|---|
SWSS IVL Identity Authentication, KYC, KYB, credentials and signing. IVL holds no balance, stakes nothing and bridges nothing: it establishes who a party is and signs what that party approves. | owns | |||
SWSS App Custody & Treasury Wallet operations, staking, treasury movement and bridging. Everything a member's holdings do happens here, under the identity IVL has established and never inside it. | owns | |||
SWSS RWAX Deed & Exchange Data The DEED-1 instruments, their records and the exchange data around them. Asset truth is owned here and nowhere else in the ecosystem. | owns | |||
SWSS NodeX Validator Operations Validator onboarding, the operating set and the parameters that govern it. Who may produce a block is decided in one place, on the record. | owns |
The Foundation appears in none of these columns. Its stewardship sits alongside the four authorities rather than above them, which is why it can maintain the specification without being able to move what the specification governs.
Anchored Today, By Design Temporary
Foundation anchoring is a starting condition rather than a destination. The direction is stated here without dates, because SWSS publishes no schedule it has not already met.
Foundation Anchored
The validator set is anchored by the Foundation while the network establishes its operating history, and participation is open to operators meeting the published requirements.
Independent Operators
Validator independence grows as operators run their own infrastructure under their own identity, with slashable collateral held by them rather than by a vendor on their behalf.
Governance Without Us In The Room
Parameter decisions, treasury movements and set rules decided through governance participation that does not route through the Foundation. Control that cannot be handed over is a dependency.
Published, And Checkable
The specification the Foundation maintains, the figures it publishes, the policies that govern use, and the ledger behind all of them. Nothing on this page asks to be believed without one of these.
This page describes what the Foundation holds and what it does. It makes no statement about its constitutional arrangements beyond registration in the British Virgin Islands.
Write To The Foundation
Questions about the standards the Foundation stewards, the intellectual property it holds, or the administrative authority set out on this page.
Foundation Enquiries
For questions about the Foundation, the standards it stewards, the intellectual property it holds, or the administrative authority described on this page.
Stewardship
Protocol, standards and marks
Documentation
Specification and policy requests
Handled In Confidence
No distribution beyond the desk
Direct Contact
[email protected]Important notice
This page is published for information only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, coin or financial instrument, and nothing on it constitutes investment, legal, tax or financial advice.
The Foundation Reserve described above is a protocol allocation governing the network's native coin. It confers no ownership interest, voting right or economic claim in SWSS Foundation, SWSS Fintech or any entity in the group, and no return, yield or appreciation is promised or implied by anything on this page.
Statements about the direction of validator independence and governance reflect present intention and are not commitments to deliver on any date. Before any decision, read the Risk Disclosure and the white paper, and take your own professional advice.