Overview

This is the technical documentation for The Standard Deviation: what the contracts enforce, what the operating policy says, and where the two currently differ.

The argument for the design — why pooling beats running a bank alone, and what the pool is modelled to earn — is the thesis ↗. The thesis is canonical. Where this documentation disagrees with it on intent, the thesis is right and this is out of date; where it disagrees on what is built, these pages are describing the code and say so explicitly.

Where things actually stand

Public contributions are not open. No contract is deployed to a public network, no governance multisig has been created, no member has contributed, and the review of the pool's code was internal. Status and limits is the full inventory.

Two things are worth knowing before you read anything else:

• Policy v1 is published, not deployed. The acquisition, dissolution and repayment rules in the thesis and in Operating policy v1 are the intended launch. Parts of them — the payout model in particular — need a contract change that has not been reviewed.
• The deployed contract still implements the earlier distribution model, with dividend targets and funded claims. Accounting describes what the code does today, and marks each place the published policy would change it.

The pages

Page	What it covers
The Reserve's rules	Issuance, retirement, licences, exit fees and dormancy — the upstream mechanics every policy below is a response to
Operating policy v1	Acquisition, dissolution, repayment, the constants, and the seven-day notice rule
Custody and the founder	Charter #729, the custodian wallet, the keeper's fixed limits, and the founder arrangement in full
Accounting	Units, admission pricing, recovery order, the fee rule, withdrawal rounds and rounding
Using the app	The screens, the figures and the unavailable states
Terms and constants	Glossary, fixed values, and the words that mislead
Status and limits	Implemented, proposed, reviewed, outstanding

The shape of it, in one paragraph

Contributors send ETH in rounds. It is swapped to $STANDARD and spent on branch licences at the Reserve's daily auction, on a charter the founder owns and custodies. Branches earn a share of the Reserve's daily issue as a balance inside the Reserve — not as tokens. The only way to turn that balance into $STANDARD is to retire branches, which destroys them, so the pool retires by rule rather than on demand. What a retirement releases is paid out to members in proportion to their units, without redeeming them. Leaving is a separate, weekly, queued process paid from the same realised $STANDARD.

What this is not

There is no promised return, no minimum payout, no withdrawal completion date and no guarantee that operating the pool earns more than it costs. Pool units are not $STANDEV and carry no entitlement to it. The thesis publishes modelled returns under explicitly stated assumptions; a model is not a forecast, and the figures move with every auction.

Where evidence cannot support a number, the app withholds it rather than showing a stale figure or a confident zero.