A credential proves a strategy's numbers are real. So the numbers had better be. We turned MIZAN's own retraction ledger — every failure mode that has ever killed one of our engines — on our own flagship credential, and published the verdict. This is not a marketing tear-sheet; it is an adversarial review that assumed the number was fake until the code proved otherwise.
The flagship credential attests that a hidden trend strategy cleared MIZAN's institutional gate with Sharpe 1.63, CAGR 26.6%, net +301.6%, max drawdown 20.76% over 12,917 four-hour BTC bars (2020–2026), after 7 bps fee + 3 bps slippage, verified zero-trust. Tested against every historical failure mode in the retraction ledger, the number holds: no lookahead, no phantom fills, correct annualization, no survivorship surface. Two residuals are disclosed below — neither touches the integrity of the proof.
The single most revealing test: benchmark the strategy against simply holding the asset over the exact same window. A strategy that is secretly just leverage would beat buy-and-hold on return with similar or worse risk. This one does the opposite — the signature of genuine risk management, not a beta illusion.
| Metric | Buy & hold BTC | Flagship credential |
|---|---|---|
| Total return | +432.7% | +301.6% |
| Sharpe (after costs) | 0.78 | 1.63 |
| Max drawdown | 77.0% | 20.8% |
| Avg net exposure | 1.00× | 0.20× |
It gives up 131 points of return to buy 2.1× the Sharpe at roughly one-quarter the drawdown — and it does so while holding, on average, one-fifth of buy-and-hold's exposure. The nominal leverage ceiling in the spec is never approached; vol-targeting holds the book far below it. This is textbook trend-following: step aside in chop and bear, size into confirmed trends. The levered-beta hypothesis is refuted by the strategy's own exposure card, which the verifier recomputes from the same position series the P&L compounds.
The audit distinguishes "the credential misrepresents the strategy" (fatal — the proof itself would be dishonest; none found) from "the strategy is real but a sharp reader should know X" (expectations-setting). Only the second kind surfaced.
|Δ(pos·lev)|) queued for the next engine re-anchor; disclosed in the interim.MIZAN's retraction ledger is a public list of its own past mistakes — lookahead, phantom fills, survivorship, monthly-sampling hiding intramonth drawdowns, carry that was gross-of-borrow. The flagship was checked against each. All clean.
file:line lives in the engine repository at docs/AUDIT_2026_07_18_v5_findings.md. Read the companion ZK Engine Security Review →Internal, AI-driven review — not a third-party audit, investment advice, or an offer of any security. Past or backtested performance is not indicative of future results. A credential attests that a strategy cleared a fixed gate on bound historical data with the integrity properties described; it does not predict future performance.