Principles

Botanary's whole design - the account, its rules, its delegations - exists in service of three principles. They apply identically whether the actor is a co-signing device, a dApp, or an AI agent.

Bounded

Authority in Botanary is never all-or-nothing. A fresh account's on-chain policy engine (AgentGuard) starts empty - allow-all, not bricked - and the owner tightens it over time: spending caps per token and period, per-action maximums, and contract/recipient allow- and deny-lists. Denylists always win over allowlists.

Delegated authority is bounded even more tightly. A delegation's budget is a lifetime total (not a rate - "per week" caps live on the account's own rules, not on a delegation), and its allowed actions are bound to specific (contract, function) pairs, not "any function on this contract."

Revocable

Every account has a single, instant kill switch: freezing it. Freezing is owner-signed, gasless, and takes effect immediately - AgentGuard clears any transfer to a pre-configured safe-harbor address before checking the freeze, so a frozen account can still recover funds to a trusted destination. Freezing has two lanes: the default owner lane (however many devices your threshold requires) and an optional "panic" lane that lets any single device freeze the account instantly, without waiting for the others to agree.

A delegation is revoked outright, instantly and permanently, through a dedicated revoke-only path that never depends on holding native gas to pay for it. There is no per-delegation freeze - a session is either enabled or gone, so the only way to pause every delegation at once is to freeze the account itself.

Devices work the same way: any device can be removed (as long as doing so doesn't drop the owner count at or below the signing threshold), and the threshold itself can be raised or lowered by the owner.

Auditable

What actually gets enforced on-chain is the source of truth, not what the owner intended to type into a form. Every delegation's plain-language summary is rendered from the policy the chain actually bound, never from the raw request - so the summary can never overstate what a delegate can do.

Every action that changes an account's authority is recorded: rules changes, delegation grants and revocations, freezes, and every relayed transaction settle into an append-only, tamper-evident audit log the owner can review at any time.

See How it works for the flow that ties simulation, enforcement, and the audit trail together on every action.