The Assay-Verified seal is the single largest source of inbound LP discovery for emerging crypto managers.

Copy-trading platforms make a manager's trades public so others can replicate them. This destroys the value of any strategy with finite capacity — front-running and replication erode the edge. Assay does the opposite: we verify the result of a strategy without exposing the strategy itself. Managers can prove their returns are real, methodologically sound, and consistent with a pre-declared benchmark, while keeping their signals, models, and trade-level decisions private.

Performance is computed using Time-Weighted Return (TWR) per GIPS methodology, which is specifically designed to neutralize external cash flows. Any deposit into the manager's account is treated as a contribution and excluded from performance; any withdrawal is treated as a distribution. Performance reflects only the change in value of capital while it was deployed.

Beyond TWR, we require pre-declaration of all wallets the manager controls at engagement scoping. Wallet-clustering analysis (similar to Chainalysis/Arkham methodology) runs continuously to detect deposits from wallets that exhibit behavior consistent with related-party flows — wallets that share funding sources, transact in patterns suggesting common control, or appear connected through shared infrastructure. Any flow flagged by clustering analysis is held aside and reviewed before being treated as a genuine external contribution.

This is the most important methodological question in crypto verification, and it doesn't apply in traditional finance. A manager running a strategy in a thinly-traded token can in principle manipulate their own mark — they hold a position, place small buy orders near the end of a reporting period to nudge the price up, and report inflated returns on a position they couldn't actually exit at the marked price.

We have three layers of defense:

1. Volume-weighted average pricing across venues, not single-venue last-print. Position marks use VWAP across all liquid venues over a window (typically the trailing 4 hours of the reporting period) rather than the closing tick on any single venue. This neutralizes most close-of-period spoofing.

2. Liquidity-adjusted valuation haircuts.If a manager holds $10M of a token with $500K daily volume, marking the full position at market price is fiction — they couldn't exit at that price. GIPS already requires “fair value” valuation. We operationalize this by applying a haircut to illiquid positions based on days-to-liquidate at realistic market impact. This is what serious crypto funds already do internally; we make it standard and auditable.

3. Position concentration disclosure.Any position larger than 5% of the token's average daily volume or 10% of the manager's AUM is flagged in the verification report. LPs see the concentration. They can decide what to make of it.

This is exactly the kind of methodological adaptation that justifies a crypto-specific verifier. GIPS requires “fair value”; we operationalize fair value for assets that trade 24/7 across fifty venues with wildly varying liquidity.

Benchmarks fall into three categories:

Beta-style — BTC, ETH, large-cap indices (Bitwise BITW, MarketVector, CoinDesk 20), and sector indices (DeFi Pulse, metaverse, infrastructure).

Strategy-style— for market-neutral strategies, T-Bills + spread; for funding-rate trades, the published funding rate of the manager's primary venue; for DeFi yield, the AAVE or Compound stablecoin lending rate over the reporting period.

Custom blended— a manager may declare a blended benchmark at engagement (e.g., “50% BTC, 50% ETH, monthly rebalanced”) and is then locked to it for the duration of the engagement.

The critical methodological point: the benchmark is declared in advance and locked at engagement scoping, timestamped at the moment of commitment. A manager cannot retroactively change benchmark to flatter their returns. This is straight from GIPS Provision 4.A.1; our innovation is enforcing it cryptographically rather than relying on the manager's documentation discipline.

Risk-adjusted metrics are computed from the same TWR series used for return reporting, against the same locked-in benchmark, using the standard CFA Institute definitions. Sharpe uses the risk-free rate appropriate to the reporting currency (3-month T-Bills for USD-denominated composites, 3-month German Bunds for EUR, etc.). Sortino uses the minimum acceptable return defined at engagement (typically risk-free or zero). Calmar uses max drawdown over the trailing 36 months.

Importantly, we report metrics over GIPS-standard horizons: 1Y, 3Y, 5Y, 10Y annualized. Strategies with less than 12 months of verified history do not receive an annualized Sharpe — only the verified period return is shown. We do not extrapolate or annualize short tracks.

No. We see your trades and on-chain positions in order to verify performance, but the verification report we publish contains only the performance series, risk metrics, declared benchmark, composite construction notes, and required GIPS-aligned disclosures. The trades themselves are never published, never sold to third parties, never used to train models, and never visible to LPs browsing the Manager Universe. Internal access to manager trade data is logged and limited to the verification team.

Self-Reported listings are free. Account-Verified is a monthly subscription. Assay-Verified is an annual engagement fee plus a monthly maintenance fee, with pricing scaled to AUM. We publish pricing only to engaged prospects; contact us to discuss your specific situation.

No. GIPS® is a registered trademark of CFA Institute. Assay is not affiliated with CFA Institute. We follow the public GIPS standards as our methodological reference, the same way independent GIPS verification firms in traditional finance (ACA Group, Confluence Technologies, Alpha FMC) follow GIPS without being arms of CFA Institute. CFA Institute does not endorse, promote, or warrant Assay's services.

Typical Assay-Verified engagement is 14–28 days from kickoff to seal issuance. Account-Verified onboarding is usually under a week. Self-Reported is immediate.

20+ centralized exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, BitMEX, Bitget, KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, dYdX, GMX, and the major derivatives venues. On-chain support spans Ethereum and all major EVM L2s, Solana, Bitcoin, Cosmos chains, Sui, and Aptos. Custody integrations with Fireblocks, BitGo, Anchorage, Copper, Ledger Enterprise.