Accountability

The Independence Ledger

Every crypto site says it is independent. This is ours, written down, dated, and published as machine-readable data so you can check it rather than trust it.

Last updated 10 July 2026 · independence.json

Everything on this page is a factual claim about our own business, and each one is independently checkable. If any statement here is wrong, that is misleading conduct on our part and we want to know immediately — tell us.

Ownership

Coinformant is independently owned and operated by its publisher. No exchange, token issuer, venture fund, market maker or trading firm holds any interest in it, directly or indirectly.

Publisher	Craig Winder
Country	Australia
Owned by an exchange	No
Owned by a token project	No
Owned by a venture fund	No
External shareholders	No

What we commit to

Ratings and rankings are never for sale. — yes

No exchange, token, protocol or tool can pay to be listed, to rank higher, to be rated more favourably, or to have a negative finding removed. There is no mechanism to do so and no price at which we would build one.

We do not rank exchanges. — yes

Our exchange directory sorts by CoinGecko’s trust rank, which is attributed to CoinGecko, or by facts you choose to sort on. We publish what an exchange lists and where it operates. We do not tell you which one to use. Beyond the editorial reason, ranking exchanges edges into financial product advice under s 766B of the Corporations Act — and from 9 April 2027 a digital asset platform is itself a financial product.

No commissioned affiliate links to exchanges. — yes

ASIC’s INFO 269 treats a unique tracked link paying a commission per click-through as likely "dealing by arranging" — a licensable financial service that the media exemption does not cover. Every link to an exchange on this site is uncommissioned. We earn nothing when you click it.

We publish our data sources and their licences. — yes

Every data source we use is listed at /data-sources, along with whether its licence permits commercial republication. Where it does not, we say so, and we do not publish that data. We hold 578 incident records unpublished for exactly this reason.

We publish corrections, with dates. — yes

Errors are corrected in place, logged publicly, and dated. Where we have rated a project and the project disputes the rating, we publish their response in full alongside it.

We accept sponsored articles or paid "reviews". — no

We do not accept sponsored posts, paid reviews, presale promotion, token listings for payment, or "guest posts" with embedded links. There is no rate card.

We hold or trade the assets we write about. — no

The publisher does not trade tokens covered on this site. Any holding that arises will be disclosed on the relevant page and in this ledger before publication.

We are owned by, or funded by, an exchange. — no

We are not. This is worth stating plainly because Australia’s most prominent crypto news outlet, cryptonews.com.au, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the exchange Swyftx — a fact disclosed in a single line of its own footer, and reported publicly by Capital Brief. It reviews its parent company and ranks its parent’s competitors.

How we make money

Revenue source	Status	Conflict	What that means
Display advertising	planned	Low	Standard display advertising, sold on audience, never on editorial placement. Advertisers get no advance sight of content and no right of review.
Affiliate links to non-financial products	planned	Medium — disclosed	Hardware wallets and crypto tax software are goods and software, not financial products. Where a link is commissioned, it is labelled as such at the point of the link, and the commercial relationship never affects what we say about the product. Negative findings about a paying partner are published unchanged.
Reader subscriptions	planned	None	A paid tier over our historical data — risk-score archives, listing history, exchange fee history. Priced in Australian dollars, never in a token.
Commissioned exchange affiliate links	not used	High — avoided	This is how most crypto comparison sites make most of their money. We do not do it, for the licensing reason set out above. If that ever changes, it will be because we became an authorised representative of an AFS licensee, and this ledger will say so on the day it happens.
Paid placement, sponsored ratings, presale promotion	never	Disqualifying	Not now, not at any price.

This ledger is published under CC BY 4.0. Cite it, quote it, and hold us to it.