# ZooBC Guardians

Canonical page: https://zoobc.com/roles/guardians/
Audience: Privacy advocates, decentralization believers, educators, moderators, and careful skeptics
Symbol: The Meerkat, watching the horizon and signaling change
Last reviewed: 2026-08-18

Guardians make ZooBC harder to fool. They verify software before anyone enters a recovery phrase, separate live network evidence from marketing claims, explain security limits honestly, and protect useful discussion without treating criticism as an enemy.

Concrete responsibilities:

- Verify Wallet and node downloads by calculating SHA-256 and checking the on-chain release registry.
- Treat a revoked release as unsafe and stop when an unexplained release-authority change is pending.
- Never ask for or accept a recovery phrase, secret key, PIN, or private backup.
- Never present an unavailable API response as zero balance, zero nodes, or an empty chain.
- Use the Explorer for live chain facts, Security for consensus mechanics, Roadmap for dates and eligibility, Tokenomics for allocations, and the Wallet manual for user-security behavior.
- Separate confirmed protocol behavior, current status, published plans, and personal interpretation.
- Preserve difficult technical criticism while removing impersonation, credential theft, spam, and fabricated claims.

Release verification without trusting a website:

```sh
sha256sum "ZooBC Wallet.html"
curl -s http://NODE:8080/api/v1/release/list
curl -s http://NODE:8080/api/v1/release/authority
```

For anything involving funds, an on-chain file match is the standard to insist on. A gateway-only match cannot protect against a compromised website serving both a fake file and its own matching fingerprint.

Primary action: Understand the security model: https://zoobc.com/security/
Related: https://zoobc.com/faq/ | https://zoobc.com/verify/ | https://zoobc.com/explorer/