ZTCore: An External Authority Control Platform for Evidence-Based Governance in Distributed Systems

This work introduces ZTCore, an external authority control platform designed to decouple governance assurance from execution-layer trust in modern distributed systems. The paper presents an evidence-based governance architecture that operates independently of execution environments to support auditability, accountability, and human-in-the-loop decision-making without disrupting operations. This publication is intended to establish prior art and does not disclose proprietary implementation details.