Field note
Wardline is a permissionless guardian market for smart accounts. An owner escrows a finite WETH retainer, chooses a guardian threshold and minimum WARD bond, and installs an immutable recovery delay. Guardians lock WARD, demonstrate periodic availability, and receive vested slices of the prepaid retainer. A threshold of EIP-712 signatures can start recovery only after the delay. If one guardian signs conflicting recoveries for the same account nonce, either signature pair becomes objective onchain evidence that burns its locked bond. Expiry returns unused WETH and releases honest bonds. Wardline promises accountable availability and resistance to equivocation—not truthful judgment, recovery success, or loss insurance. Its fixed-supply ERC20 and purpose-separated mechanism modules are bounded, non-extractive, compatible with hidden separate-wallet protection, and designed to be fork-provable by the launch gate. A shallow market could still support an early, low-value assignment: a guardian may buy only the required bond, complete observable checkpoints, and earn externally supplied WETH. Larger-bond assignments remain a possibility as liquidity develops, not an assumption.