A VOW IS NOTA PAYMENT
A treasury signs a vow with its own key: an amount of SOL, a window, and the reason it says the money is for. Nothing is deposited and no key is ever handed over — the signature proves the treasury meant it, and that is all it proves.
From then on Vowpad reads that treasury. It sums what has actually left since the vow was made, subtracts the network fees it paid along the way, and compares the total against what was committed. ⚠ Fees are not payments: a vow to spend 0.14 SOL on buybacks is not kept by 0.14 SOL of transaction fees.
The reason is printed in full beside the figures and takes no part in any verdict. That is the whole design. A board that let a persuasive sentence stand in for an outflow would be the thing this one was built to replace.
The six verdicts
committed more than the treasury could ever have paid — this one was never payable
the window closed and the money did not move
the window is open and nothing has moved yet
some of it moved, not all, and the window is still open
every lamport committed has left the treasury
we could not read the treasury — this one is about us, not about the vow
A private key or a seed phrase, ever. Every request body is scanned for anything shaped like one and refused before it is read. ⚠ That guard was narrowed once, after it rejected an ordinary English sentence in the one field built to hold English — a guard that refuses the real thing gets switched off, and a guard that has been switched off protects nothing.