Build a zero-trust mainnet-readiness evidence gate with no manual bypass

[Muyideen-js]

Executive objective

Define the final launch program spanning independent audits, formal properties, reproducible builds, economic stress, load limits, key ceremonies, monitoring, incident drills, governance, migration, legal assumptions, and public artifact verification.

Why this is research-grade work

This issue crosses multiple trust boundaries and cannot be completed by adding a UI control, copying a library example, or demonstrating a happy path. The solution must remain correct when users, infrastructure providers, wallets, maintainers, and economic participants behave concurrently or maliciously. Every assumption about Stellar consensus, Soroban authorization, ledger timing, storage lifetime, cryptography, and off-chain services must be written down and testable.

The implementation must optimize for verifiable guarantees rather than impressive screenshots. If an absolute guarantee is impossible, the design must state the failure probability, trusted parties, detection method, maximum blast radius, and recovery mechanism. Centralizing the difficult component is not an acceptable shortcut unless the resulting trust model is explicitly approved.

Required threat scenarios

unknown critical bugs; admin compromise; deployment error; provider outage; governance capture; liquidity shock; incomplete evidence; launch-pressure overrides; unverifiable artifacts

These scenarios must be tested in combinations as well as isolation. At least one sustained randomized or chaos campaign must preserve seeds, traces, ledger ranges, artifacts, and minimized counterexamples so another contributor can reproduce the exact failure.

Mandatory architecture work

• Write a design document containing state machines, trust boundaries, data flows, authorization graphs, invariants, failure semantics, and alternatives considered.
• Identify every contract entry, event, RPC method, wallet permission, key, database table, hosted dependency, and operational role introduced or changed.
• Define deterministic behavior for retries, duplicates, reordering, timeout, rollback, upgrade, partial failure, archival, and provider disagreement.
• Bound all attacker-controlled collections, loops, payloads, retries, storage growth, CPU, memory, ledger footprint, and financial exposure.
• Preserve backward compatibility or supply a versioned migration, dry run, invariant checkpoint, rollback decision, and recovery procedure.
• Add privacy-safe observability with metrics, structured errors, correlation identifiers, SLOs, alerts, and explicit data-retention limits.
• Produce an economic and operational cost model for normal, peak, and adversarial workloads.

Required proof of completion

Publish a signed machine-readable evidence bundle mapping every criterion to tests and artifacts. Any unmet critical criterion must automatically block mainnet deployment, and bypass mechanisms are explicitly prohibited.

Claims must be backed by machine-checkable proofs, transaction hashes, deterministic test output, benchmark data, signed artifacts, or independently reproducible commands. A written assertion without evidence is not completion.

Verification matrix

• Unit tests for all state transitions, conversions, boundary values, and error mappings.
• Integration tests against fresh contracts and isolated funded Testnet accounts.
• Property and invariant tests covering conservation, authorization, uniqueness, and bounded liveness.
• Stateful fuzzing with shrinking and reproducible seeds.
• Load and resource tests at expected scale plus documented safety margin.
• Failure injection for network loss, provider corruption, stale state, duplicate delivery, and interrupted upgrades.
• Negative tests proving prohibited operations fail without partial state or value movement.
• Compatibility tests across supported browser, wallet, contract, schema, and deployment versions where applicable.

Deliverables

1. Approved architecture and threat model before production implementation.
2. Production code with no simulated success, placeholder verification, silent fallback, or unbounded retry path.
3. Reproducible fixtures, generators, benchmarks, test accounts, and machine-readable configuration.
4. Security review notes including unresolved assumptions, residual risks, and explicit non-guarantees.
5. Deployment, migration, rollback, monitoring, incident-response, and disaster-recovery documentation.
6. User and maintainer documentation sufficient for an independent team to operate the feature.
7. Final evidence report mapping every acceptance statement to its proof, test, trace, benchmark, or transaction.

Pull-request and review gates

• Submit the design as a reviewable artifact before a large implementation PR.
• Keep generated artifacts reproducible and identify their exact source inputs and tool versions.
• Require at least one independent reviewer for implementation and a separate security-focused reviewer for trust-boundary changes.
• CI must run the deterministic verification suite and reject undocumented ABI, event, storage, authorization, or cost changes.
• Critical and high-severity findings must be resolved; accepted lower-severity risk requires a named owner and deadline.

Explicit rejection conditions

The issue is not complete if the result is only a mock, design sketch, centralized proxy, manual-only process, unverifiable benchmark, unaudited cryptographic invention, copied proof without implementation linkage, or happy-path demonstration. It must not introduce hidden custody, privileged bypasses, secret-bearing logs, unauthenticated administrative endpoints, arbitrary upgrade power, or claims of decentralization that conflict with the documented trust model.

Definition of done

• Every mandatory deliverable is linked from the pull request.
• Clean-checkout reproduction succeeds using documented commands and pinned dependencies.
• Testnet verification uses fresh accounts and independently checked contract IDs.
• Performance and cost remain within declared budgets under adversarial input.
• Monitoring distinguishes healthy, degraded, unsafe, and recovering states.
• No unresolved critical or high-severity issue remains.
• A new maintainer can deploy, verify, operate, upgrade, and recover the feature without private tribal knowledge.

Roadmap item 50 of 50. Difficulty is intentionally extreme; scope reduction requires a recorded architecture decision.