Four revenue streams, all listed below: Team Finance tool fees (our sister company — when a project pays for a lock, our group is paid), one labelled sponsor slot per day, labelled placements through a partner app, and deBridge affiliate fees. None of them touches a number we publish, because there is no number we publish that could be improved by paying us. We do not sell a rating, because we do not have one.
Who owns us?
The awkward version first, because the comfortable version would be a form of hiding.
Locksley is built by TrustSwap. TrustSwap also owns Team Finance. Team Finance sells the liquidity locks, team-token locks, vesting schedules, staking pools, airdrops and multisenders that this site reports on. Its lock contracts will be the source of every escrow figure we publish. When a project on Robinhood Chain pays Team Finance $150 to lock its liquidity, our group is paid — and this site is where a great many of those projects will have first read that locking exists.
So the site that will tell you whether a token's liquidity is escrowed is run by the company that sells the escrow. There is no arrangement of words that makes that not a conflict. What follows is what we do about it.
We charge for the doing, and never for the reporting. Every figure Locksley publishes about a token is free, identical for everyone, and computed the same way whether the project has paid Team Finance a dollar or nothing at all. The tools are the business. The reporting is the product, and a product that could be bought would be worth nothing to the person it is for.
How does Locksley make money?
Four streams. Each one answers the same four questions, in the same order — and the fourth is the one that matters.
Team Finance tool fees
$150 per lock · $100 vesting · $50 multisenderThe sponsor slot
$1,200 per day · one per dayPartner distribution
Rate card, per campaigndeBridge affiliate fees
Trades made through the deBridge application embedded on our buy and bridge pages include a small affiliate fee paid to Locksley. deBridge shows it in your quote before you confirm — it is never hidden in the rate, and nothing Locksley publishes is affected by whether anyone trades.
What none of that money buys
- How a token's data is displayed. Free, identical for everyone, never ranked by who paid.
- A position in any list on this site. Sorting is by the stated field and nothing else.
- Coverage, or the absence of it. The news feed is chronological — newest first, with the source named. Nothing in it is ranked, and nothing in it can be bought. When the ranked daily brief ships, its full method will be published at /methodology#brief before the first edition. There is no paid slot in the brief and no way to remove yourself from it.
- A safety rating. We publish none for any token, at any price. No combination of the numbers on a token page amounts to one, and a customer is not an exception.
- The removal of an inconvenient number. Requests to remove one are logged below whether or not they are granted.
Three of those five appear verbatim on the pricing page as well, because a policy a reader can only find in a legal document is not a policy a reader will ever find.
Where does the disclosure actually appear?
This page is not the disclosure. It is the account behind it.
The regulators are unusually direct about this. The FTC's guidance on endorsements says a hyperlinked disclosure is easily avoidable, meaning that the disclosure is not clear and conspicuous
, and that the closer a disclosure sits to the thing it qualifies, the better; it also assumes a reader sees only the single piece of content in front of them, not your whole site. The UK's advertising regulator has ruled the same way in practice — a disclosure visible only after a reader clicks through to a linked page does not suffice.
So the operative disclosure lives on the page you were reading, and this table is what it says there. It is written to be checked: open any of these surfaces and the sentence should be where this table says it is.
Team Finance, our sister company— rather than deferring it to a footnote or a footer.
Locksley is built by TrustSwap, which owns Team Finance.In the body of the item, every time, whether the story is flattering or not.
ADVERTISEMENTabove the unit, before a reader engages with it — not below it, and not in a hover.
The pressure ledger
The part that is a measurement rather than a promise.
An ethics policy is not self-enforcing, and the clearest evidence for that is in our own category: a major crypto newsroom's independence policy read exactly as well on the day its owner forced a story to be retracted, its editorial chair resigned in protest and its editor-in-chief was fired days later. Nothing on the policy page changed, because nothing on it had ever been a measurement.
So here is a counter. Every request to change, soften, delay or remove something we have published is logged — whether or not we grant it — within five working days, with who asked and what happened. The log is appended to and never edited. Requests from inside our own group are marked as such.
A zero here is only worth what the rule is worth. The rule is that a request is logged when it is received, not when it is resolved — so a request being considered right now would already be on this page. If you ever see this counter move without a matching entry in the corrections log, that is a failure and it is worth saying so loudly.
Why we publish no rating — and why that is a disclosure, not a slogan
A conflicted advisor who has disclosed the conflict gives worse advice, not better. We removed the advice.
The research on conflict-of-interest disclosure is not comfortable reading for anyone who thinks a page like this is sufficient. In the foundational experiment, advisors who disclosed their conflict went on to give more biased advice than advisors who did not — the disclosure licensed the bias — while their audiences, who might have been expected to discount it, discounted too little. Audience accuracy got worse and audience payoffs fell by about a fifth. Later work names the mechanism on the audience side: rejecting advice after a disclosure feels like accusing the advisor of dishonesty, so people comply more, not less.
Read carefully, that literature is about advice — a conflicted party recommending a course of action, with a disclosure attached. The bias needs somewhere to live. So the response is not to word this page more carefully:
We publish no rating, no score and no grade for any token, so there is no recommendation for a disclosure to license. What we publish instead is named, dated, individually checkable facts, each carrying its denominator and its source, plus a plain statement of what we did not check. A fact does not become more flattering because its publisher was paid; a rating does. This is why the methodology page spends longer on what our numbers exclude than on what they include.
It is also why the one number a project might most want from us — a single figure summarising whether their token is safe — is the one thing on this site that is not for sale at any price. It is not for sale because it does not exist, and it does not exist on purpose.
Two ways this goes wrong, both of which have already happened
Named, because a commitment written against a specific failure has a shape, and one written in the abstract does not.
A disclosure regime that asks the wrong question
A well-regarded crypto news outlet published a detailed, dated, per-staffer table of everyone's token holdings — genuinely more granular than most newsrooms manage. It then emerged that its chief executive had taken tens of millions of dollars in undisclosed loans from a trading firm the outlet covered. The disclosure page was never the problem. It asked what staff held; it had no way to capture what leadership had borrowed, because the only person who knew controlled whether the fact entered the system at all.
The lesson we take: a page that asks the wrong question cannot be saved by asking it more prominently. This is why the ledger above counts requests rather than only holdings — pressure is the thing that actually reaches the page you read.
An independence policy with nobody to enforce it
Another outlet — owned, like us, by a company with a stake in the market it covers — held one of the strongest written independence policies in the sector, including automatic in-article disclosure whenever its owner was mentioned. It did not survive contact with an owner who wanted a story gone. The policy was excellent. The enforcement depended on the party the policy constrained.
The lesson we take: we do not yet have an independent decision-maker either — see what we have not solved. We would rather say that than describe a firewall that does not exist.
Who may hold a token this site covers?
Nobody who writes here may hold a token this site covers.
Anyone who writes, edits or decides what appears on Locksley is barred from holding any token that trades on Robinhood Chain, in any amount, including tokens they no longer cover. This is a flat prohibition rather than a disclosure threshold, because a threshold requires the person with the conflict to measure it, and the case above is what that produces.
Holding TrustSwap equity or compensation tied to the group is not prohibited — that is the ordinary condition of working somewhere — and it is exactly the conflict this whole page exists to describe. It is not disclosed per person because it applies to everyone, which is a statement about the whole site rather than about any byline.
What we have not solved
Written down because the alternative is discovering it later, in public.
- There is no independent decision-maker. If TrustSwap asks for a story to be changed, the person deciding works for TrustSwap. Every credible model in this category — an editorial charter with an outside chair, a trust with reserved governance rights, an ombudsman — solves that structurally, and we have not. The ledger is a partial substitute: it makes the request visible even when the decision is not independent. It is not a full one.
- When lock tracking ships, we will index one locker. That locker is our sister company's. When a competitor deploys on this chain we will index it, and the honest reading of that coverage will be that our own group's product is the one we can see. The coverage statement says this on every token page.
- The sponsor slot is the sharper legal exposure, not the referral links. Carrying third-party crypto advertising is a regulated activity in several places we can be read from, and it belongs to whoever sells the slot before the slot is sold.
- Nobody audits this page. Everything on it is our own account of ourselves. The parts you can check independently — the referral parameters in our URLs, the labels above the ad units, and, when lock tracking ships, the contract reads behind every escrow figure — are the parts worth checking.
Changelog
v1.0 — 20 August 2026. First publication. Establishes the three revenue streams, the placement table, the pressure ledger, the flat prohibition on staff token holdings, and the four unsolved items above.
