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Policies define the approval requirements for operations across your organization. Rules within a policy act as safety checks: when a specific action (the trigger) occurs, the rule determines the outcome — quorum approval, or an outright block. Rules operate at two levels:
  • Admin policy — Applies to organization-wide operations such as inviting users.
  • Vault policies — Applies to asset-specific operations in vaults the policy is assigned to, such as withdrawing funds.
When a rule is triggered, the required administrators receive a notification to review the request. Once the necessary quorum is met, Anchorage Digital performs a final review of the operation. To add, edit, or delete rules and configure their quorums and sub-quorums, see Rules.

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When policy changes take effect

A policy change applies to operations created after the change. It doesn’t change an operation that’s already waiting for approval. When someone creates a withdrawal or an administrative operation, Anchorage Digital finds the rule that covers it and saves that rule’s quorum — the eligible approvers and the number of approvals required — alongside the operation. Approvals are counted against that saved copy, so a pending operation keeps its original requirements even after you edit the policy. Lower a quorum, add an approver, or enroll a replacement iPhone for an approver, and the pending operation still needs the people it needed when it was created. If those people can no longer approve, most often because someone enrolled a new iPhone, reject the operation and create it again. The new one picks up your current policy. See Pending operations and policy changes for examples and how to clear a stuck operation.

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Managing policies on iOS

You can view and edit vault policies directly from the Anchorage Digital iOS app under the vault settings.

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Conditional rules

A vault policy can hold a conditional rule in addition to its base rule. The conditional rule is evaluated first — if its condition matches the operation, its outcome applies; otherwise, the base rule applies.
A policy’s conditional rule sits above its base rule. Only the topmost rule in a policy can carry a condition, so evaluation order is always conditional rule, then base rule.
The available condition checks the withdrawal destination:
  • Destination is any trusted address, or in any vault using this policy — matches when a withdrawal goes to an address on your trusted destinations list, or to another vault covered by the same policy.
  • Quorum is — the operation proceeds to approval once the required number of quorum members sign off.
  • Block — the operation is rejected outright, with no quorum collected.
Whichever rule applies, its outcome is either Quorum is or Block. Block is available on vault policies only — see Outcomes. A common configuration only allows withdrawals to trusted destinations: set the conditional rule’s condition to destination is any trusted address with a Quorum outcome, and set the base rule’s outcome to Block. See Rules to add a conditional rule, or Example policy setups for this and other configurations in full.