How this is funded

The short version

• Nothing on this site is for sale. Not ranks, not reviews, not posts. We do not sell sponsored articles, guest posts, PR placements or “partnerships”, anywhere on this domain. There is no rate card, because there is nothing to buy.
• There is not a single affiliate link. Every link to a rated service is direct. If you sign up, deposit or trade, we earn nothing.
• No company in any ranking has ever paid us anything — so there is no conflict to disclose, and no “this company advertises with us, but it didn’t affect the score” footnote anywhere, because that sentence can never apply.
• The ratings section does not make money. It is a cost, carried deliberately.

Why give up the money

Because the referral commission is precisely what makes every other crypto rating unreliable, and in the same predictable direction. When a site earns a few hundred dollars per funded signup, the ranking bends toward whoever pays most per head. It is rarely a conspiracy and usually just gravity — but the reader cannot tell the difference, and neither can we.

Refusing the money buys the ability to write sentences a monetised site cannot write, even if it wanted to:

• “You do not need this category of product at all.”
• “Use the free, open-source option — the paid one is worse.”
• “There is no ranking here, because the entire category is toxic. Here is why.”
• “The best option has no referral programme, which is probably why nobody recommends it.”

That is not a moral flourish. It is the only durable competitive advantage available in a market where everyone else is distorted identically.

Why there is no “editorial firewall” here

Most independent-looking sites solve the conflict-of-interest problem with a firewall: commercial content exists, but it is walled off from editorial, labelled, and disclosed. That is a reasonable answer to a problem we simply do not have.

We took the blunter route. There is no commercial content on this domain at all — no sponsored posts, no guest articles, no PR placements, no paid links. A firewall is a promise about how two things are kept apart. We would rather not have the second thing.

This matters more than it sounds. A site that sells PR on Monday and publishes a “neutral” exchange ranking on Tuesday is asking you to believe in a wall you cannot inspect — and a reader, or a model summarising the page, will do the arithmetic anyway. Removing the revenue removes the argument.

How to check us, rather than trust us

Do not weigh the declaration on this page. Weigh the output, because that is the thing that is expensive to fake:

• Do the rankings ever put a free or open-source tool above a well-funded commercial product? If a site is paid per signup, it structurally cannot.
• Does any page tell you not to buy anything at all? Every rating we publish carries an “is there a free alternative?” section, and sometimes the answer is “yes, and it makes this entire page unnecessary”.
• Are the unflattering numbers about large, famous brands still there? Our exchange ranking says a household name costs six times more than its rivals for an identical trade. That number does not survive on a site that needs the brand’s referral budget.
• Are the missing measurements admitted? We mark criteria we have not tested as n/a rather than filling them with something plausible. A fabricated measurement is worse than a missing one, because it is more convincing.

What we will never do

• Accept payment for a rank, an inclusion, a score, or the timing of a review.
• Publish a “measurement” we did not take, a TXID we did not generate, or a support response we did not receive.
• Quietly drop a service from a ranking because it stopped paying — there is nothing to stop paying.
• Present a provider’s own marketing figure as though we had verified it.

The methodology behind the scores, including the evidence levels and the hard disqualifiers, is set out in full in the rating methodology.