Pause / revoke
The owner's immediate, break-glass freeze on a vault, independent of any hosted workflow.
Pause is an immediate, owner-only freeze on a vault. Once paused, the covenant refuses ordinary agent spends until the owner unpauses it. This is the fast, low-ceremony response to a suspected problem — a compromised agent key, an agent behaving unexpectedly, or simply wanting to stop activity while you investigate.
Why "break-glass" matters here
Pause (and its more severe counterpart, terminal owner recovery) is deliberately never gated by any hosted workflow — no governance ceremony, no approval collection, no server availability requirement beyond being able to reach the Kaspa network with your own wallet. If the PolicyVault hosted server were down, degraded, or even compromised, the owner can still pause or recover a vault, because the only thing required is the owner's own signature accepted by Kaspa consensus.
What pausing does and does not do
- Does: immediately stops the covenant from accepting new agent spends against the vault.
- Does not: revoke or delete an agent's configured policy — pausing is reversible. To actually remove an agent's ability to spend permanently, see Rotate an agent (replacing its key) or, for a full stop, terminal recovery.
- Does not: require or wait for any pending approvals or governance proposals to resolve first.
Unpausing
Only the owner can unpause a vault, again through an owner-signed covenant operation. There is no separate "administrator override" — application roles never grant this ability.
When to use pause versus recovery
Pause when you want to stop new spending while keeping the vault, its policy, and its balance otherwise intact — for example, while investigating a suspicious agent. Use terminal recovery (see Owner recovery) when you want to withdraw the vault's funds entirely, such as after confirming a genuine compromise or when retiring a vault.
See also: Pause an agent for the how-to, Vault states.