Rules

These are rules, not preferences. When someone asks for a score, the answer is that we published a rule.

These are rules, not preferences. They exist because the pressure to break them will be constant and reasonable-sounding. When someone asks for a score, the answer is "we published a rule," not "we'd rather not."

1. No verdict, ever. No trust score. No category scores. No stars, grades, tiers, or shortlists. No "picks that might be interesting." No hot list. Five category scores are five verdicts with extra steps: people average them in their heads, and then we have built a rating service that denies being one.
2. Colour marks direction, never worth. A number that went up is green and one that went down is amber, because that is what the number did. No coin is ever coloured good or bad.
3. No project money. No paid listings, no sponsored entries, no referral revenue on exchange links, ever.
4. No holdings. The operators hold nothing. This removes the front-running conflict and the selection-bias problem in one move.
5. News and price never get a story. On a big move the site lists the headlines that name the coin from the last three days, and says plainly when there are none. It never says one caused the other.
6. Nothing goes live without a human. Machines detect, humans verify.
7. Every claim carries a source and a snapshot. If it can't be shown, it doesn't go on the page.
8. Retire the word "unbiased." Let the structure make the claim. Saying it invites the argument.

Corollaries that follow from the rules

• Preset sorts use factual names only ("most delivered in category", "longest silent", "most rescheduled"). No weighting anywhere.
• Competitor blocks are ordered by size, a fact, never by our opinion.
• The gap to a coin's rivals is arithmetic on today's market caps ("its price would need to rise 295% to be worth what the average privacy coin is worth"), printed with the group and the leader it is measured against. It is never a target and never a forecast; the line beside it says so.
• "Reasons to be careful" is the other side, printed the same way: no stated use for holding the coin, more past due than delivered, priced above its rivals with nothing delivered, half the supply still to come, rivals that ship while it does not. Facts a reader can check. Never "sell", never "short", never "avoid".
• "Leading its field" is three printed tests (on top of its group, three deliveries, use dated ahead). A leader is a record, not a recommendation.
• "What to do" on a small coin is a next step, not a call: add it to My coins and come back on its next dated step, because that is when the record changes. No buy, sell, hold, or position size, ever.
• Contract facts are presented as facts, never as a reliability verdict.
• The disclosure bot replies with the delivery record only. No characterization. Never the word "shilled."
• Addressable-market figures are factual market sizing, cited to source with date. Never "how much it will solve"; that is forecasting.
• Entries are immutable and append-only, with a reason on every change.

Design rules (they serve the rules above)

• Dark, bold, alive. The site is a dark, colourful, interactive dashboard: stars, breathing glows, a floating universe of coins, animated meters. The audience has been trained by polished feeds; a plain catalogue loses them before the first fact. Colour never marks worth: cyan is delivered, violet is open, amber is past due, green is up, amber is down.
• The answer first. Every coin page opens with four figures and three plain sentences a reader can say back without scrolling; the receipt (every promise with its proof) comes next. Graphics before words; sentences live in the detail.
• Same sections on every coin. Eleven sections in one order; a missing piece is a stated fact, never a blank. Learn one page, know them all.
• Everything is clickable, nothing is cut off. Every number opens the list behind it. No text truncated, no row cut through, no empty box. Fits at 1920, 1536 and 1366 wide and on a phone.
• Not generated-looking. Sentence case, hairlines, no all-caps labels, no emoji, no arrows on buttons, no coloured stripe over a panel, no grid of identical cards, no scores dressed as meters. Public Sans, self-hosted.

What counts as delivered, missed, or withdrawn

A promise is shipped when all three hold:

1. The thing described is publicly usable or publicly published (mainnet code live, a document published, a feature reachable by users). A testnet release ships a promise only if the promise was about a testnet.
2. There is evidence a stranger can open: a release page, a block explorer entry, a repository tag, an announcement on the project's own channel. That evidence goes in delivery.evidence.
3. What shipped matches what was promised. If the scope shrank, record the delivery with a note saying what was left out, and open a new promise for the remainder if the project still commits to it.

A promise is missed when its due window has fully passed and no delivery is recorded. Windows end on the last day of the stated day, month, or quarter, using the latest revision. A vague promise has no window and is never missed; it is shown as open with its own words for timing.

A promise is withdrawn only when the project itself said so, with a source. Silence is not withdrawal. Silence is an open promise.

What counts as a promise

A public, dated, checkable statement by the project about something it will build or do. "We are exploring" is not a promise. "Coming Q3" is. A roadmap item under a dated heading is a promise with that heading's date. A roadmap item under no date is a vague promise if it commits ("will ship"), and not a promise at all if it merely describes a direction.

Write plain so that someone with no crypto background can say it back to you. Never characterise. "The team will release a new consensus client" is fine. "The team finally ships" is not.