Fact-Checking Policy
The advantage of a public ledger
Crypto journalism has one enormous advantage over every other financial beat: much of the evidence is public, permanent, and checkable by anyone. A transfer either happened on-chain or it did not. A contract either holds the funds or it does not. CRYPTO QUILL builds its fact-checking around that advantage, and this page explains the process a claim goes through before we publish it, so you know exactly how much weight an article of ours can bear.
Verifying on-chain claims
When a story rests on something the blockchain can show, we check the blockchain, not the tweet about the blockchain.
- Transactions and flows. Claimed transfers, exploit drains, whale movements, and treasury spends are verified against block explorers and, where useful, independent analytics tools. We link transaction hashes and addresses in our reporting so readers can repeat the check.
- Attribution is the hard part, and we treat it that way. The chain proves that funds moved; it rarely proves who moved them. Wallet labels are inference, not fact, and we describe them honestly: “a wallet linked to” is not “the company”, and we do not flatten that distinction for a sharper headline.
- Reorgs, bridges, and multi-chain trails. Fresh on-chain events are re-checked after confirmation depth, and cross-chain claims are traced across each chain involved rather than assumed.
Verifying project announcements
A project’s announcement is a claim by an interested party, and we treat it as one. Before an announcement becomes a story, we confirm it appears on channels the project verifiably controls, since fake announcements through hijacked accounts are a standing feature of this industry. We read the linked material itself: the actual proposal, the actual audit, the actual contract change, because announcements routinely describe their contents optimistically. “Partnerships” get particular suspicion, and where the announcement is material and the other party is reachable, we ask the other party. A press release that survives this treatment becomes a short, accurate story; one that does not becomes either no story or a different story than its author hoped.
Verifying exchange statements
Exchange claims move markets and hold customer money, so they get the full treatment: statements are taken from official channels, checked against observable behaviour (withdrawal processing, on-chain reserves where visible, status pages) and against user reports pointing the other way, and attributed precisely. “The exchange says withdrawals are normal” and “withdrawals are normal” are different sentences, and we use the one we can support. Proof-of-reserves claims are reported with their limitations stated, because a snapshot of assets without liabilities proves much less than the branding suggests.
The checking process itself
Every article is checked by its writer against a source list, and market-sensitive claims, allegations of wrongdoing, exploit reports, and anything involving named individuals get a second pair of eyes before publication. Numbers are traced to their origin: a market cap to the data source and its timestamp, a “hacked for $40 million” figure to the wallets that actually drained. Quotes are checked against recordings or original posts. Where two data providers disagree, which in crypto is constantly, we say which we used and why, or give the range. On a breaking story we publish what is verified and label what is not, and publishing less always beats checking less.
What we do with rumours
Crypto trades on rumour, and pretending rumours do not exist would make our reporting less useful, not more honest. Our rule: an unverified claim is either newsworthy enough to report as an unverified claim, clearly labelled, with whatever checking we could complete and whatever response the subject gave, or it is not reported at all. We do not launder rumours into fact through phrasing, and “sources say” on this site means we have spoken to the sources and assessed them, as described in our Editorial Standards.
Links, so you can check us
Wherever a primary source exists and linking it is safe, we link it: the transaction, the filing, the governance vote, the announcement, the audit. The point of this policy is not that you should trust us; it is that you should not have to. Readers who follow our links and check our work are doing exactly what our Disclaimer asks of them, and occasionally they catch something, which brings us to the last section.
When a check fails after publication
Sometimes verification later proves wrong: a source misled us, an attribution collapses, a number is revised. When that happens the fix runs through our Corrections Policy: fast, visible, and stated plainly on the article. If you have evidence that something we published fails any check on this page, send it, ideally with hashes or links, to support@cryptoquill.com with “Correction” in the subject line.
