Declarations on governance, rights, and the conduct of this Institute
Set down once, in plain terms, so that they may be checked against us. They are the terms on which we ask to be read.
Most governance tokens are voting theatre. A token whose holders may cast votes but cannot enforce outcomes — cannot install or dismiss operators, cannot constrain spending, cannot claim a share of revenue — carries no right worth the name. The vote is the performance; the rights are the contract.
Real power sits in legal controls, not in code. Multisig keys, foundation discretion, operator companies, and off-chain constitutions decide what a protocol becomes. Where a token's "governance" ends at a signalling poll while an upgrade key rests in a wallet, the governance is in the wallet.
Decentralised finance deserves the infrastructure that public markets built over a century. Information rights that compel disclosure on a schedule. Treasury covenants that bind how funds may be spent. Recallable authority for those who granted it. Revenue distribution written into the contracts themselves. And mergers that can be conducted on-chain under rules fixed in advance.
Public markets did not obtain these things by sentiment. Disclosure arrived because it could be verified, and because its absence carried cost. We hold that the same discipline — named standards, auditable criteria, evidence attached — is what decentralised finance lacks, and therefore what must be built.
We exist to make rights verifiable. Our determinations are published, hash-committed, and recorded as on-chain attestations that anyone can check without trusting us. Scores are free to read, and the criteria behind them are free to inspect.
No issuer pays, and no issuer is the client. We are funded by those who consume governance quality — the people and institutions that rely on it — not by those who are scored. A body paid by the entities it assesses would eventually sell its own silence; we decline that arrangement in advance.
The standard is the product. Not the commentary, not the rankings, not the attention. We publish named standards with code-level criteria and an open revision log, and we hold our own work to them before we hold anyone else to theirs.
The badge is earned, not bought. It is earned by passing audits against code, contract state, and observed behaviour, and it is lost the same way. Nothing can be purchased from us that substitutes for passing.
The reader is entitled to the receipts. Every determination carries its evidence: the contracts examined, the state read, the tests run, the hash that commits the record. If we are wrong, the receipts will show where.
We submit these declarations to the same scrutiny we ask to apply. A standards body that exempts itself is a press office. Check our methodology, our funding, and our record against this page. Amendment, if it ever comes, will be dated and reasoned.
Adopted by the Probity Institute, August 2026. Amendments, if any, will be recorded with dates and reasons.