Sources & method

Funding announcements, company registries, on-chain records, shutdown notices, roadmaps, archived project pages, and posts by projects and the people who ran them.

Amounts are what was announced. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed, and an announced round is a ceiling rather than a receipt. Announced, offered, sold and received are kept as separate things, because they routinely differ.

A page is not authoritative because it looks official. Court records, regulators, company registries and on-chain data sit at the top because of who controls them. A project’s own announcement proves what the project said — useful, and not the same as proving it was true.

Dead projects create a specific trap: domains expire and get bought, handles get reassigned. A page fetched from a project’s old address today may have nothing to do with the project. Without an archived copy predating the shutdown, or continuity of ownership across it, we treat what we retrieved as an unattributed web page.

When a source is retrieved it is saved and fingerprinted, and entries cite that stored copy rather than the live URL. Pages get edited, paywalled and deleted — especially the ones that matter — and a citation that quietly stops meaning what it meant is worse than no citation.

Each of these turns something unknown into something asserted:

• Market capitalisation is not money raised.
• Token supply multiplied by a headline price is not a sale.
• Secondary trading volume is not project revenue.
• A token allocation is not realised wealth.
• Company spending is not personal enrichment.
• A missed roadmap is not fraud.
• Silence is not a shutdown.
• An allegation is not a finding.

It does not investigate. It does not allege fraud, theft or misappropriation, estimate what founders personally took, or narrate why a company failed beyond what a source states.

That work takes months per project and we would rather cover a great many projects accurately than a handful speculatively. Where a page looks thin, it is thin because the public record is.

A blank is not an oversight. If the evidence does not answer a question, the page says so. For people, there is a difference between not having checked and having checked without finding an answer, and the pages distinguish the two.