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Bantu
Contents02 · Custody & operational risk

Keys, thresholds and blast radius.

Every control in chapter 01 is exercised by a signing key. Bantu supports native account-level multisignature governance — co-signers, weighted signing, and separate thresholds for low-, medium- and high-risk operations — without relying on a smart contract to implement any of it.

Edition 1Last reviewed July 2026bantufoundation.org/institutions
Signing governance

Institutional N-of-M, natively.#

An institution can add co-signers, assign signing weights and set thresholds for operations of differing risk. Dual control, four-eyes approval, segregation of duties, treasury approval hierarchies, HSM or MPC signing workflows, board-level approval for high-risk actions, independent compliance approval for freeze or clawback, and disaster-recovery key structures are all expressible as account configuration.

Figure 4 · Threshold ladder
Activity
Example control
  1. Customer trustline approval
    Compliance key with low threshold
    1
  2. Routine treasury transfer
    Operations plus treasury approval
    2
  3. Asset issuance
    Multi-party high threshold
    3
  4. Freeze or clawback
    Compliance, risk, legal and treasury approval
    4
  5. Change issuer policies
    Senior governance or board-controlled threshold
    5
  6. Emergency recovery
    Pre-defined disaster-recovery multisig arrangement
    5
A practical institutional structure. Weight requirements rise with the consequence of the action; emergency recovery is a pre-agreed arrangement rather than an ad-hoc escalation.
Account separation

Separate what creates value from what moves it.#

A secure Bantu deployment separates the account that creates the asset from the accounts that distribute, control and trade it. The primary issuance authority can remain offline and inaccessible to routine business operations, which limits operational exposure to the accounts that are necessarily online.

Figure 5 · Account topology
Cold · restricted
Issuer account

Creates the regulated asset. Offline or highly restricted; kept out of routine business operations.

Operational
Distribution

Customer issuance, redemption, liquidity, treasury distribution and settlement.

Delegated
Compliance

Trustline authorization, freezes and customer access controls.

Multisig
Treasury

Controlled by institutional multisignature policy.

Market
Liquidity

Market making, FX routing and settlement operations.

Compromise of an operational account does not confer issuance authority. That property is structural, not procedural.
Settlement integrity

It completes in full, or it fails in full.#

A Bantu transaction can contain multiple operations — payments, asset exchanges, trustline changes, signer changes and order-book operations. The transaction either completes entirely or fails entirely. There is no partially applied state to detect, reverse or reconcile.

Critical for
  • Delivery-versus-payment
  • Payment-versus-payment
  • FX settlement
  • Simultaneous debit, conversion and credit
  • Redemption and asset burn
  • Conditional treasury releases
  • Controlled disbursement workflows
Conditional settlement

Claimable balances.#

An asset can be held on ledger for defined claimants under specified conditions, with claimant conditions enforced by the protocol rather than by an intermediary. Creation and claiming are native operations.

Used for
  • Escrow
  • Conditional merchant settlement
  • Payroll disbursement
  • Grant or aid distribution
  • Refund workflows
  • Supplier-payment release
  • Time-bound claims
  • Inheritance or recovery procedures
  • Settlement pending compliance approval

One account can sponsor another account's ledger reserve requirements — including accounts, trustlines, signers, offers, data entries and claimable balances. A bank, PSP, government or wallet provider can therefore pay the network-reserve cost on behalf of end users.

Figure 6 · Reserve sponsorship
Sponsor
Bank, PSP, government or wallet provider

Pays the ledger reserve for accounts, trustlines and claimable balances it creates on behalf of users.

Sponsored
End-user account

Holds a zero balance of the network asset and still transacts normally in the regulated asset.

Effect
Zero-friction onboarding

Removes the requirement for a retail customer to source a network token before receiving money.

This is a financial-inclusion mechanism as much as an onboarding one: a customer can hold and receive regulated money without ever acquiring the network token.
Chapter 03

Who watches the ledger.

Custody structure determines who can act. Chapter 03 documents who can see — the AML operating model, the audit trail exposed through the Expansion API, and what a supervisor can monitor without privileged access to any institution's systems.