How we measure

Review sites rank by crowd opinion, which can be gamed. Analyst firms rank by expert opinion, which can't be checked. Counterparty Catalogue ranks by public evidence — and shows its work on every number.

One rule: measure what can be verified

Every number we publish traces to a source that can be checked: an incident report, an audit publication, a license register, an on-chain record, or the provider's own published material. If a claim can't be verified, we don't score it — we say so.

Where profile data comes from

Provider profiles are built from exactly two kinds of source, and nothing else:

• The provider's own published material — their website, their documentation, their API references, their published policies.
• Information the provider gives us directly and verifies as accurate. Many providers in the catalogue have done exactly that.

We never fill gaps with rumor or third-party guesswork. Capabilities are recorded in three honest states: offered, not offered, or not found — a gap in the record is never dressed up as a zero.

Reviews are identity-verified

Where we collect reviews, the reviewer's identity and relevance are verified before the review counts — almost always through their company email. A review of a DeFi-facing service comes from a verified DeFi practitioner, not an anonymous account.

Per-vertical methodologies

Different verticals produce different kinds of evidence, so each ranked vertical gets its own published methodology:

• Smart contract auditor rankings methodology — how auditors are measured on evidence (Failure Rate, Severity) and verified peer review, on two deliberately separate axes.

As new verticals are ranked, their methodologies will be published here before the rankings ship.

Provenance, corrections, and what we will never do

• Every data point carries its source and the date we recorded it.
• Every merge, dedup, or correction in our incident data is logged in an audit trail — no silent changes.
• Found an error? Tell us — corrections are applied with the change logged, and disputed attributions are marked while under review.
• Rankings are never for sale. No sponsored placement. No paid feature will ever touch a public number.