Who pays us

1. Who pays us

This page sets out how Philidor earns money, where that creates a conflict with the independence of our risk data, and what we decline.

Most of our revenue comes from the people who rely on our risk data rather than from the products we assess. It is flat subscription and fixed-fee work, billed monthly or annually. We do not price our risk products as a share of assets, and none of that revenue moves with the size or outcome of a transaction.

The people who pay us are allocators, distributors, and platforms who need to know what an on-chain product depends on before they list it, fund it, or report on it. We also take issuer-paid work, and we run vaults of our own. Both are set out below, because a reader deciding whether to trust a score should not have to discover them somewhere else.

2. When an issuer pays us

We do accept work paid for by the issuer of the product being reviewed, in the form of fixed-scope readiness engagements. Where that is the case, we say so on the output. The fee buys the process, not the result.

Issuer-paid engagements are quoted as a fixed amount agreed before work starts. No part of the fee depends on the score, tier, or conclusion we reach, and no part of it depends on the issuer raising capital or completing a transaction. An unfavourable result is still the result, and we revise results when the evidence changes. The same published methodology applies whoever paid.

3. We curate vaults of our own

Philidor operates as a vault curator on Morpho. Those vaults are scored by the same published methodology as everything else we cover, which means we score a market we also take part in. That is a real conflict and we would rather name it than let you find it.

What constrains it: our curated vaults get no scoring advantage and no exemption from the rules that apply to every other vault. Scores are produced deterministically from the published method rather than by discretion, so a Philidor vault cannot be marked up by hand, and vault results are not ranked in our favour. Where our vaults appear in analytics they are labelled with Philidor as curator. One place we do give ourselves prominence is the curator filter in analytics, where Philidor is pinned to the top of the list.

What curation is, precisely: depositors choose to put funds into a vault, and the vault allocates across underlying markets under published rules. Depositors keep custody in their own wallets. It does not make us anyone's adviser, and it does not mean we hold your keys or decide your allocation.

What we earn from it: the performance fee on both Philidor-curated vaults is currently set to zero, so we do not today take a share of their assets or returns. If that changes, this page changes with it. Read all of this as a reason to check our vaults against the method rather than to take them on trust.

4. Separation of commercial and methodology decisions

Commercial terms and methodology decisions are approved separately. The methodology is versioned and published, and a change to it applies to every covered product rather than to one customer's holdings.

Reviewers sign attestations against a specific version of a classification. Those records are append-only, so a later revision does not quietly replace what was said before. You can read the methodology at docs.philidor.io and the version in force through the public API.

5. What we do not do for money

Some things we decline, because doing them would compromise the independence that makes the rest of it worth buying.

We do not take custody of your assets or keys, execute or route transactions on your behalf, or hold client funds. We do not recommend a specific product to a specific investor, and we do not accept payment contingent on a transaction, on capital raised, or on an insurance policy being sold. We do not sell placement, introductions, or distribution of a product we assess. We are not a broker, an investment adviser, a transfer agent, or an insurance producer, and nothing we publish is investment advice.

Where a customer needs any of that, it is done by a regulated firm that is not us, and that firm makes its own decision. The scope of what any particular engagement covers is set by the signed agreement for it, which controls where it differs from our standard terms.

6. Limits of what we publish

Our output is measurement, not investment advice, and not a credit rating. A score is a view of risk under a published method at a point in time. It is not a promise about future performance and not a statement that a product is safe.

Coverage is incomplete and some inputs are supplied by the issuer. Where a field is not independently verified, or a scenario is not yet general availability, we label it rather than smoothing over it.

7. Raising a concern

If you believe a published result is wrong, or that a commercial relationship has influenced one, write to contact@philidor.io. We will look into it and correct the record where a correction is warranted. Corrections are published against the version they affect.