The three grades
Each grade has its own seal, and the seal sits beside every graded claim
Confirmed
It happened, and a primary record shows it.
What it takes: a filing, a live product, an on-chain transaction, a passed governance vote or the party’s own published record.
Announced
A party has said it will happen, and it hasn’t yet.
What it takes: a statement from the party itself. We name who said it and when.
Speculated
An argument or an inference, ours or someone else’s.
What it takes: nothing more than the reasoning, and we say so plainly.
An announcement is never written as a fact. Treating one as a fact is the mistake we see most often in tokenised markets, and the grades exist to catch it.
The method
How a claim earns its grade
- We go to the primary source. That means the filing, the governance proposal, the chain itself, or the party’s own release. We link it.
- A report is not a record. News coverage of an announcement is still an announcement. A claim only reaches confirmed when we can point to the thing itself.
- When sources disagree, the weaker grade wins. We say which sources disagree and why.
- No trace, no fact. A factual claim we can’t trace is never published as fact. It is either marked speculated, with our reasoning, or left out.
- The grade is about the claim, not the project. A project we rate highly can make an announcement that stays announced for a year, and we grade it the same way as anyone else’s.
Record updates
When a grade changes
- Upgrades and downgrades are published. When a claim changes grade, we post a record update with the claim, the old grade, the new grade, the evidence and the date. A downgrade gets the same billing as an upgrade.
- Overdue is recorded. When a party’s own date passes and nothing has happened, the claim stays announced and is marked overdue until the party says otherwise.
- The history stays visible. The original grade isn’t erased. You can see what we said, when, and what changed it.
Our calls
When we expect an event, we say so and log it
- Events only, never prices. We call things like a vote, a launch date or a migration. We never call a price, a target or a return.
- Every call is dated, with the event, the date we made the call and the source we based it on.
- Every outcome is recorded, right or wrong. Misses stay in the log with the hits, so you can judge our record as a whole.
Corrections and what we hold
We correct in public, and we say what we hold
- Corrections stay public. When we get a grade or a fact wrong, we correct it where it appeared, date the correction and say what changed. We don’t quietly edit.
- What we hold. Our founder holds positions in some of the assets we cover. Every piece that touches one says which, and we never state a position’s size. A holding never changes a grade. The details are on the disclosure page.
- Think a grade is wrong? Send us the source at hello@thegoldenrecord.xyz. If it changes the grade, we’ll publish the update and credit you.