House rules

How we handle evidence

Ten rules. They are not a mission statement — each one is already enforced somewhere in the code, and each entry below links to a surface where you can watch it being kept. They exist because the alternative is a dataset that looks better than it is.

01
Self-reported is not verified.
A project saying a thing about itself is a claim, and we record it as a claim. A check we ran ourselves is evidence, and we record what was checked and when. The two never share a badge. Nothing in any self-serve path — a submission, a registration, a claimed listing — can mint a verified state.
Kept on: Sato Score methodology · Preflight rules · Agent Passport
02
Null is unknown. It is never zero.
A reading we could not take says nothing about the thing we were reading. An unmeasured number is published as null with the reason it is null, never rounded to zero and never dropped into an average. In every ranking, unknown sits below a good reading and above nothing — never below a bad one.
Kept on: Agent economy · How Sato Route chooses · One page per number
03
Unknown never becomes no.
Absence of a record is absence of a record. When we hold nothing, the answer is unknown — not a low-confidence guess, and not a quiet negative. This is the rule that costs us the most, because unknown is a worse-looking answer than a confident one.
Kept on: Preflight rules
04
Never sum across venues, chains or stages.
Every measured row carries the grain it was measured at. Adding rows across different venues, chains or funnel stages produces a number that means nothing and reads as if it means everything, so the storage grain is built to make that addition impossible rather than merely discouraged.
Kept on: Agent economy · One page per number
05
A death is a measurement.
When a project goes quiet or an endpoint stops answering, we record it and keep the record. Dropping dead things out of the dataset makes every survivor look healthier than it is. A retirement is an observation about silence, never a judgment about the people who built the thing.
Kept on: Reliability · Changelog
06
A disclosure describes. It never clears.
A skill disclosure lists what a skill does — hosts it contacts, credentials it asks for, shells it can reach. Listing those things is not approving them, and an empty disclosure is not a clean bill. Where a registry ran its own scan, that result is attributed to the registry, not adopted as ours.
Kept on: Skills
07
A claim grants no trust.
Proving control of a listing's domain lets the owner correct descriptive fields — text, links, tags, chains. It cannot touch verification status, score, ranking, featuring or any market flag, and there is no public claimed badge, because a badge reads as endorsement and a claim is not one. The editable set is an allowlist, checked twice and asserted by a test.
Kept on: Sato Score methodology
08
We never hold your keys, and we never hold your funds.
Sato Route hands back a transaction; you sign it. Fees are parameters inside the transaction you sign or an entry in a venue's own reward split, disclosed before signing, and an unsigned or failed transaction pays nothing. Nothing we run relays, forwards, nets or settles a payment.
Kept on: Sato Route · How Sato Route chooses
09
No listing is presented as safe, audited, verified or profitable without evidence.
The words we will not write are not a style preference; they are load-bearing. Every published verdict, score and route says what was read and when, and stops there. Where evidence would be needed and does not exist, the field stays empty rather than being filled with something that reads well.
Kept on: Sato Score methodology · Preflight rules · x402 verified
10
Every number names its method, its source field and its date.
A figure without a method is a rumour with a decimal point. Ours travel with the field they were read from and the moment they were written, so anyone can re-read them and disagree with us using our own data.
Kept on: One page per number · Preflight rules · Free data exports

What this costs

Keeping these rules means publishing worse-looking answers than we could. Unknown appears where a confident number would read better. Dead projects stay in the record where dropping them would lift every average. Most of the index sits at caution, because most projects have never been independently checked — including good ones. That is the honest shape of the data.

Questions

What are Sato Hub's trust rules?

Self-reported is not verified. Null is unknown. It is never zero. Unknown never becomes no. Never sum across venues, chains or stages. A death is a measurement. A disclosure describes. It never clears. A claim grants no trust. We never hold your keys, and we never hold your funds. No listing is presented as safe, audited, verified or profitable without evidence. Every number names its method, its source field and its date.

Does Sato Hub say whether a project is safe?

No. No listing, score, verdict or route on Sato Hub is presented as safe, audited, verified or profitable without evidence, and every published figure names what was read, the field it came from and the date it was written. Where evidence would be needed and does not exist, the field stays empty.

What does a null mean in Sato Hub's data?

Unknown, never zero. A reading we could not take says nothing about the thing we were reading, so it is published as null with the reason, never rounded down and never dropped into an average.

Does claiming a listing make it verified?

No. Proving control of a listing's domain lets the owner correct descriptive fields only — text, links, tags, chains. It cannot reach verification status, score, ranking, featuring or any market flag, and there is no public claimed badge, because a badge reads as endorsement.