Editorial Standards & Ethics

The problem these standards answer

Crypto media has an integrity problem, and pretending otherwise would itself be a breach of these standards. Undisclosed paid coverage, writers quietly holding the tokens they hype, “news” sites that are marketing departments with an RSS feed: readers have learned, correctly, to ask who benefits from every article they read. CRYPTO QUILL operates on a simple bet: that the way to be worth reading in this industry is to be verifiably unconflicted. This page is the contract. It applies to every member of our small editorial team, without exception, and every article we publish is subject to all of it.

Holdings, trading, and conflicts of interest

This is the section crypto readers rightly skip to, so it comes early and in plain words.

• No undisclosed positions behind coverage. No member of our team writes, edits, or assigns coverage of an asset in which they hold a material position that has not been disclosed internally. Where a disclosed holding could reasonably be seen to colour a piece, the piece is reassigned or the holding is disclosed to readers on the article itself.
• No trading on our own journalism. Team members may not trade an asset ahead of our unpublished reporting on it, in either direction. Knowing a story before the market does is the whole temptation of this job; acting on it is front-running, and it is a firing offence here.
• No pump pieces, ever. We do not publish price predictions dressed as reporting, “next 100x” listicles, countdown pieces engineered to manufacture urgency, or covertly commissioned enthusiasm of any kind. If an article exists to make you buy something, it is marketing, and marketing on this site is labelled as such or does not run.
• No payment for coverage. Nobody can buy an article, a favourable angle, a softened headline, or a spiked story. Projects offering tokens, allocations, or “marketing budgets” in exchange for coverage are declined and, when the offer is brazen enough to be newsworthy, covered.
• Free assets are disclosed or refused. Airdrops, review units, conference tickets, and paid travel are refused where practical and disclosed where accepting was necessary for the reporting.

Sponsored content and advertising

Advertising funds the site; it does not steer it. Sponsored content, where we carry it, is labelled clearly enough that a reader skimming on a phone cannot mistake it for reporting, is excluded from our news feeds’ editorial slots, and is never written by the journalists who cover the sponsor’s sector. Advertisers get no preview of coverage, no veto, and no warning. The full rules, including the categories of advertiser we refuse outright, are on Advertise With Us and Ownership & Funding.

Sourcing and verification

We verify before we publish, and our Fact-Checking Policy describes the machinery in detail. The standards layer on top of it:

• Primary sources outrank everything. On-chain data, official filings, signed statements, and original documents beat screenshots, and screenshots beat nothing at all, which is what an unsourced claim is.
• Pseudonymous sources are usable, with care. Crypto’s best sources are often anonymous accounts with provable track records or provable wallet control. We assess pseudonymous sources on what they can demonstrate, not on their follower count, and we corroborate before we rely.
• Right of reply. Anyone facing a damaging allegation in our reporting gets a genuine chance to respond before publication, with enough time and enough detail to answer properly. “They did not respond by press time” has to be earned honestly.
• Source protection. When we promise confidentiality, we keep the promise. We minimise what we know about anonymous tipsters and we do not burn sources, full stop.

Independence from the industry we cover

We cover exchanges, funds, and token projects; we do not partner with them on editorial, accept embedded “collaborations”, or join token launches, allowlists, or private rounds. No outside party reviews our copy before publication. Being covered accurately is not a service we sell, and being an advertiser buys no immunity from our reporting, a sentence advertisers are asked to acknowledge before they buy anything.

Fairness, clarity, and labels

News, analysis, and opinion are labelled and kept distinct. Headlines must be supported by the article beneath them; we do not write “BREAKING” over speculation or turn an analyst’s guess into a declarative headline. We use precise language about risk: “audited” is not “safe”, “partnership” is not “endorsement”, and an anonymous team is described as exactly that. Where jargon is unavoidable, we explain it, because a reader who cannot follow the mechanism cannot judge the risk.

Errors and accountability

When we fail these standards, we say so. Factual errors are handled under our Corrections Policy, quickly and visibly. Breaches of the conflict rules by team members are treated as the serious matter they are. And this page itself is subject to revision as the industry invents new conflicts to guard against, which it reliably does. If you believe our coverage has fallen short of anything written here, write to support@cryptoquill.com and say so plainly; that address is read, and the evidence, as always, decides.