What is Token Transparency

This framework enables token projects to communicate a standardized set of essential information to the market. 

Designed as a one-time filing, the Token Transparency Framework focuses on 18 criteria divided into four categories: Project & Team, Financial Disclosure, Token Supply, and Market Structure. The responses, scores, and the framework are publicly available on this site.

Investors gain visibility into the operations of businesses and limit the risk of manipulation and abuse through transparent disclosure of these criteria. Negative events across the market in recent months prove the need for a standardized transparency standard.

More available information means the industry can accelerate toward optimized best practices. Beyond the token issuers themselves, key players in the market directly benefit from this effort:

• Retail participants receive otherwise obfuscated information.
• Professional investors access streamlined due diligence processes.
• Market makers gain a simplified method to evaluate counterparty risk.
• Centralized exchanges can accelerate listing velocity via structured data and disclosure.

Motivation

Today, the crypto market operates without a single, standardized disclosure framework.

Because of this, the market is left without key information about token supply and vesting schedules, insider incentives, and basic financial data in a fast-moving environment. This information gap fuels mistrust and, ultimately, results in the misallocation of investor capital.

We believe this framework pushes more information into the market and improves capital allocation in the industry by enabling projects to signal credibility, allowing investors to better underwrite risk with standardized disclosure of information, and minimizing the ability for bad actors to profit on ambiguity.

Framework Details

Each criterion is weighted 0–3 by materiality, scored, and aggregated into a “transparency score” that reflects the project’s transparency.

Importantly, this score is not a quality assessment of the team or project. Rather, it is a measure of the project or team’s overall transparency. It reflects the level of visibility into the project’s operations based on the disclosures requested in the framework.

Why now?

We see a disclosure framework as complementary to Hester Peirce’s commentary on Safe Harbor and Paul S. Atkins’ views on DeFi, and strongly believe the time is for a grassroots initiative to self-regulate.

We call on the community to provide feedback on the criteria, for projects to complete the framework, for exchanges to use the framework as a resource in the listings process, and for investors to leverage the framework for due diligence.

We view this as a working document subject to future improvements and iteration. For a deeper conversation, reach out at research@blockworks.co.