How we make money | The Hardy Index

The short version

The Hardy Index rates blockchains and does not sell ratings. It earns money in the guide layer, through affiliate links that are labelled where they appear and sponsorship that is labelled "Sponsored". The ratings, the methodology and the chain profiles carry no commercial content of any kind, apart from a single labelled module on each profile that links to guidance and never to a product.

What earns money

Affiliate links in the guides. Where a guide recommends a product, some links earn a commission if you buy. Those links appear inside a labelled module, with a disclosure line directly above them, and each product is listed with what it does not fix as prominently as the reason to consider it.
Sponsorship in the guide layer. A sponsor can pay for a labelled placement on a guide. It is marked "Sponsored", it is visually separated from anything that looks like a rating, and it carries the dates of the placement. A sponsor never appears on the index, on a chain profile, on the methodology page, or anywhere else a Hardy Score is visible.

What never earns money

Ratings. No chain, foundation, exchange or issuer can pay for a rating, a review, a tier, a position in the ranking or an expedited assessment.
The index, the methodology, the chain profiles and the changelog. These pages carry no affiliate links and no advertising.
Coverage decisions. Which chains are rated, which are held back and when a score changes are editorial decisions, made against the published rubric.
Corrections. Nobody can pay to have a correction published, delayed or removed.

How the separation is enforced

A promise is worth less than a mechanism, so this one is built into the code rather than left to good intentions.

The scores are arithmetic. A Hardy Score is computed from six published dimension scores and six published weights. There is no field a commercial arrangement could touch, because there is no stored score to touch.
Commercial content lives in one module. Every partner, every link and every sponsorship is declared in a single file that the rating code does not import. Nothing in the ratings pipeline can read it.
Affiliate links are marked at the source. A commercial link is emitted with rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" and a visible label. There is no way to publish one that looks like an ordinary editorial link.
No trackers. The Hardy Index runs no affiliate scripts, no pixels, no advertising network and no retargeting. Links are plain outbound anchors in static HTML, so nothing follows you off this site. The one measurement script is Google Analytics, which counts page views, loads nothing until you accept it, and has no access to which link you clicked or what you bought. See the cookie policy.
Products are chosen editorially. A place in a guide cannot be bought. Products that earn nothing are listed beside products that do, on the same terms, and labelled as earning nothing.

Who we currently have arrangements with

This is the full list, as of 12 August 2026. Each product is discussed in the guides with its limits stated, and each links to the vendor's own documentation so you can check what we say about it.

Trezor Safe 7. Affiliate arrangement. The Hardy Index may earn a commission if you buy through our link. Discussed in the wallet guide.
Ledger. Affiliate arrangement. The Hardy Index may earn a commission if you buy through our link. Discussed in the wallet guide.
The QRL wallet. No commercial arrangement. Included on merit, and it earns us nothing. Discussed in the wallet guide.

No sponsorship has been sold. When a placement runs, the sponsor is named here as well as on the page it appears on.

Positions and conflicts

The Hardy Index holds no position that a rating could move. It is not run to benefit a token, a fund or a protocol, and it is not affiliated with any blockchain, foundation, exchange or issuer. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed here first and on every page affected.

Affiliate arrangements are with wallet and hardware makers, which are not rated by this index. The index rates layer-1 blockchains. No company that could appear in the ranking earns us anything, which is the simplest reason the ratings stay clean.

How to hold us to this

If you think a rating has been influenced by a commercial relationship, say so and we will answer publicly. If a score is wrong, the most useful thing you can send is the primary source that contradicts it. Write to index@hardyindex.com, and read the methodology if you want to check our arithmetic first. Corrections are published in the changelog with a reason and a source, including corrections to our own errors.