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Escrow Activation Runbook

The Heartbeat Failed. Now What?

A one-page, IT-auditor-readable runbook for the day a Sovereignty Preservation Clause trigger or escrow heartbeat fails. Plain English. No AI engineering required. Designed to be printed, signed, and filed in the firm's vendor-management binder.

THE SHORT ANSWER

If the escrow heartbeat fails or any other named trigger fires, the Failsafe Activation Continuity Plan executes. In-flight reviews stay accessible in read-only mode for the first 24 hours. Both escrow agents (US-domiciled primary plus a second jurisdiction) release a signed source-code bundle, the cryptographic keys, and the infrastructure provisioning recipes to active paying customers. Your royalty-free internal-use license auto-vests. Your platform team stands the stack up on customer-provisioned infrastructure inside 60 days. Continuity is mechanical, not contractual.

The Five Steps

Step A

The Escrow Agent Contacts The Firm IT Contact

The escrow agent (Iron Mountain Technology Escrow Services, Delaware-domiciled, default for US firms) emails and calls the firm's named IT contact within 10 business days of confirming a trigger event. The trigger may be a 30-day heartbeat lapse, a written sunset notice from NHN, a corporate dissolution filing, a documented founder-incapacitation affidavit, or a Sovereignty Preservation Clause acquisition trigger.

What the firm IT team does: acknowledges receipt to the agent within one business day. The acknowledgment is the agent's confirmation that the firm contact-of-record is intact and reachable. Iron Mountain will not release the deposit until acknowledgment is received.
Step B

Source Code Plus Cryptographic Keys Delivered Via Signed Bundle

The agent delivers the deposit as a single PGP-signed tarball (`redline-escrow-YYYY-QN.tar.gz`) downloadable from the agent's secure portal using a firm-specific access credential. The bundle includes the full source tree, a top-level MANIFEST.md with SHA-256 checksums for every file, build scripts, dependency manifests with version-pinned lockfiles, deployment documentation, and the cryptographic keys required to decrypt any encrypted-at-rest artifacts in the deposit.

What the firm IT team does: verifies the PGP signature against the agent's published release key, hash-checks every file against MANIFEST.md, then archives the verified bundle to the firm's existing source-control repository. Total time: under 30 minutes for a competent IT generalist.
Step C

Royalty-Free Internal-Use License Auto-Vests

The Liability Harmony Addendum, Section 7, vests a royalty-free internal-use license to the deposited source code in every active paying customer at the moment of trigger. No additional contract execution is required. The license permits self-hosted operation, internal patching, and continued use on existing or replacement hardware. No redistribution rights, no resale, no commercial re-licensing.

What the firm IT team does: nothing. The license is in the firm's existing enterprise contract on the day it was signed. Outside counsel can review the license language inside the addendum at any time.
Step D

Read-Only Continuity Window And Mid-Audit Status Auto-Generator

From T+0 to T+24 hours, customer access to in-flight reviews remains available in read-only mode on the existing tunnel endpoint. No new submissions during the window, but every flagged risk, partner annotation, and audit log already produced stays accessible. The mid-audit status auto-generator captures the exact frozen state of every active deal room and packages it as an exportable bundle the firm can hand directly to outside counsel.

What the firm IT team does: downloads the auto-generated audit-state bundle to firm storage. The bundle is the bridge between the read-only window and customer-operated REDLINE post-deposit. Total time: under 15 minutes per active deal room.
Step E

Customer-Provisioned Stand-Up On Customer Infrastructure

Within 10 to 60 calendar days of trigger, the customer stands up the deposited stack on customer-chosen infrastructure (cloud, colo, or on-premises) using the included terraform / ansible procedures. The deposit ships with a BUILD.md walking through the provisioning path, plus a working reference deployment that runs end to end on a single Apple Silicon developer machine for validation. Documented runtime is 8 to 14 calendar days for a competent platform team. From T+60 onward, the customer-operated stack is fully independent of NHN. Routine OS, dependency, and inference-framework patches proceed on the firm's normal change-management cadence.

What the firm IT team does: runs the provisioning playbook with help from the firm's platform team or a contracted infrastructure firm. No AI-engineering skill required for stand-up; the deposit includes runbooks for every routine maintenance task.

What This Runbook Is NOT

Pre-Trigger Tabletop Exercise

Firms that want to walk through Steps A through E with a live deposit before any trigger fires can request a tabletop exercise. NHN provides a sandbox copy of the most recent quarterly deposit, the firm IT team runs through the runbook against the sandbox, and any gaps in the documented procedure get fixed before they matter. The exercise takes approximately 90 minutes and produces a signed attestation the firm files in the vendor-management binder.

Request The Tabletop Exercise

Send a single email and the sandbox bundle, the IT-auditor checklist, and the named-agent contact reference arrive within one business day:

Email: [email protected]

Subject line: "REDLINE Escrow Activation Tabletop Exercise Request"