What we will and will not take money for.
We are publishing this before we have a single sponsor. Rules written while money is on the table read as a negotiation. Written beforehand, they are a standard — and one we can be held to.
The short version
Advertising pays for the free tier. It does not buy coverage, softer coverage, or a say in what we publish. We would rather run fewer ads than run one that costs a reader’s trust, because that trust is the only thing here that cannot be rebuilt with effort.
What we will never accept
- Presales and token launches. Any offer whose value depends on the reader buying in early.
- Memecoins. No exceptions, including ones with real volume.
- Unaudited platforms. If custody of someone else’s money is involved and there is no published audit, the answer is no.
- Anything sold on a promised return. Including yield figures presented without their risk.
- Coverage itself. An article, a rating, a mention, or a position in a list is not for sale at any price.
One bad sponsorship erases two years of credibility. The money never covers that, so the calculation is not close.
How paid placement appears
- Labelled Sponsored Intel, in a visually distinct block. Never inside the run of editorial, never styled to look like it.
- Written by us or fact-checked by us. A sponsor’s claim about their own numbers gets the same verification as anyone else’s.
- Never in the newsletter’s lead story, and never in the Sunday Watchlist.
What sponsorship does not buy
- Advance sight of anything we are about to publish.
- Removal or softening of critical coverage.
- Immunity. If a current sponsor ships a bug, gets exploited, or misrepresents a number, we cover it exactly as we would cover anyone else — and we disclose the relationship in the piece.
- An introduction presented as editorial judgement.
Disclosure
Where a piece touches a company we have any financial relationship with, that is stated in the piece, near the top, in plain words. Not in a footer, not in a page you have to go looking for.
Affiliate links
Where we use one, we say so at the point of the link. We only carry them for tools we use ourselves, and a commission never determines whether something is recommended.
If we break one of these
Tell us, publicly. We will correct it in the same place and at the same size as the original, and say what happened. Our record of corrections is public for the same reason our sources are.
This policy can only get stricter. If we ever loosen it, that change will be published here with the date and the reason, not made quietly.