Fact-Check Policy

Every statistic, regulatory citation, and quantitative claim CoinLaw publishes goes through a verification process before it is published. This page lays out that process in full. It complements the Publishing Principles, the Ethics Policy, and the Corrections Policy.

Why Crypto Regulation Needs Its Own Verification Standard

A statute that is in force on a Monday can be amended, paused, or replaced by a Friday. An enforcement action announced in a press release sometimes lands in the docket weeks later under different language. On-chain volumes shift sharply with one large transaction. None of this is unusual for our beat, and our verification process is built around it.

Scope: What Counts as a Verifiable Claim

Every factual sentence in a CoinLaw article maps to a specific verbatim source excerpt. The following are treated as verifiable claims and are tagged accordingly:

Numbers: percentages, dollar amounts, transaction volumes, user counts, market shares, time-series figures
Statutory and regulatory citations: rule numbers, sub-sections, enforcement actions, court rulings, agency announcements
Dates: when an event occurred, when a rule takes effect, when a report was released
Direct attributions: who said what, in which document or filing, on which date
Derived figures: calculations the article makes from public data, with the underlying numbers and the math shown

Editorial interpretation, forward-looking analysis, and opinion are tagged separately and clearly distinguished from verified facts. Where we draw a conclusion, we cite the evidence that supports it.

Sources We Treat as Primary

US federal regulators and agencies: SEC, FinCEN, OCC, CFTC, FDIC, NYDFS, the Federal Reserve, Treasury, IRS
International counterparts: FCA (United Kingdom), MAS (Singapore), EBA (European Union), BIS, IMF, FATF, OECD
Standards bodies and protocol foundations: IEEE, IETF, RFCs, the Bitcoin and Ethereum foundations, canonical protocol whitepapers
Court records and filings: PACER, CourtListener, official agency complaint and order portals
On-chain data and exchange disclosures published in official documentation
Peer-reviewed academic research and central-bank working papers

The following are not treated as primary, regardless of how authoritative they look: secondary aggregator articles, vendor marketing pages, single-source surveys without a disclosed methodology, and other publishers’ glossaries or dictionaries. When a competitor article cites a primary source, we trace that primary source ourselves and cite it directly.

The Nine-Layer Verification Workflow

An article cannot ship until each layer below has passed for every claim in it. The first three layers are deterministic; layers four onward involve named human reviewers.

Source capture. Every source is fetched, the publication date and a content hash are recorded, and the verbatim excerpt that supports the claim is stored before the article is drafted.
Claim tagging. Every factual sentence in the draft carries a tag pointing to the exact source excerpt it is derived from.
Deterministic checks. Tooling validates that every claim tag resolves to a real excerpt, that quoted text matches verbatim, that math in derived figures is correct, and that no statistic is left untagged.
First-pass verification. Each claim is independently checked against its source excerpt and returned with a structured decision (supported, uncertain, or contradicted) and a confidence score between 0.0 and 1.0.
Second-pass re-check. Numerical, ordinal, and superlative claims, plus any first-pass result with a low confidence score, are re-checked. If the second pass falls below the threshold, the article does not ship.
Source-tier check. Where the verifying excerpt is from a secondary source, we re-fetch the primary source before publishing.
Volatility check. For fast-moving topics like exchange volumes, on-chain balances, and recent enforcement actions, sources older than 48 hours are refreshed before the article is published.
Editorial review. A named CoinLaw reviewer with credentials in the article’s subject area reads the piece end-to-end before publication. Reviewer name and credentials appear on every article.
Audit log archived. The verification log capturing every claim, source, decision, and confidence score is archived alongside the published article.

Any unsupported claim at any stage blocks publication until it is corrected, re-sourced, or removed.

The Internal Confidence Threshold

Every quantitative claim is graded internally on a confidence scale during verification. Claims below the publish threshold do not ship. The grade is part of the audit trail, not displayed inline. The presence of a claim on a CoinLaw article means it has cleared the threshold.

Independence and Conflicts of Interest

CoinLaw does not accept compensation from any company, exchange, regulator, law firm, or token project in exchange for coverage. Reviewers disclose any relevant employment or advisory positions on their author profiles. An article touching a topic where the assigned reviewer has a conflict is reassigned to a different qualified reviewer. Sponsored content is never published as editorial.

Re-verification Cadence

Crypto regulation and on-chain data change quickly. Statistics articles are reviewed and refreshed when their underlying data is updated or a material change occurs. News articles are updated when new and material information emerges. Every article carries the date of its most recent review.

Corrections

If you find a factual error, please tell us. We respond to every correction request, document the change publicly, and update both the article and our verification log. The full process is in the Corrections Policy.