Policy Manager Guides

These guides cover the day-to-day operations of a Policy Manager — from integrating your smart contracts with ACE to configuring and managing compliance policies.

How it all fits together

The Policy Manager revolves around a handful of entities that work together to enforce compliance on your smart contracts. Understanding how they relate to each other makes the individual guides much easier to follow.

• PolicyEngine — The on-chain orchestrator that evaluates policies. Everything — targets, policy instances, and extractors — is scoped to a single engine.
• Extractors — Modules that decode transaction calldata into named parameters (sender, amount, etc.) so policies can evaluate them. Attached to the engine at creation time.
• Target — A smart contract associated with an engine through automatic onchain detection or manual API registration.
• Policy Type — A reusable compliance rule from the Policy Library (e.g., allowlist, volume limit, pause toggle).
• Policy Instance — A deployed policy contract created from a policy type, configured with your parameters, and scoped to an engine.
• Protection — The binding between a policy instance and a specific function on a target contract. This is what makes a function "policy-protected."
• Data Validator — An optional contract attached to an identity policy's credential source that validates the contents of a credential (e.g., a jurisdiction allow/deny list), not just its existence.
• Managed offchain policy (MVP) — A CRE workflow and onchain validator managed by Chainlink that evaluate external risk data before issuing a permit for a specific transaction intent.

Typical setup flow

1. Create a PolicyEngine with extractors for your contract type: built-in ERC-20 or ERC-3643, built-in CCIP-AdvancedPoolHooks, or your own type.
2. Integrate your contract through PolicyProtected or a direct Policy Engine call.
3. Deploy and connect your contract. ACE can detect its onchain attachment or accept manual registration.
4. Create policy instances from the Policy Library with your configuration.
5. Attach policies to functions by creating protections.

Smart contract integration

• Making Your Contract ACE-Compatible — what your contract needs to work with ACE (inheriting PolicyProtected, adding the runPolicy modifier)
• Protect CCIP Token Pools with ACE — connect CCIP AdvancedPoolHooks and enforce policies on cross-chain token transfers
• Building a New ERC-20 Token — reference implementation for a compliance-ready ERC-20 token
• Building a New ERC-3643 Token — reference implementation for an ERC-3643 security token
• Upgrading Existing Contracts — how to add ACE compliance to an already-deployed upgradeable contract
• Security Considerations — key security patterns and pitfalls when integrating with ACE

Policy engine and policy management

• Managing Policy Engines — create, view, update, and archive policy engines
• Managing Targets — detect or register deployed contracts as targets under a policy engine
• Managing Policies — browse policy types, create and configure policy instances
• Protecting Target Functions — bind policy instances to specific functions on your target contracts
• Managing Data Validators — enforce rules on credential contents (e.g., jurisdiction allow/deny lists) by attaching Data Validators to identity policies
• Custom Policies — write, deploy, and register your own policy contract, then use it like a library policy

• Offchain Policies — understand the managed and custom models, configure the managed wallet screening MVP, and integrate offchain permits