The agreement between you and Onyx Ratings AG when you read, rate, review, apply, or build on our data.
Our ratings are opinions, not investment advice. You can read everything for free, quote us with attribution, and lose access if you scrape abusively or impersonate us. We can be wrong; we publish it when we are. Nothing here waives that.
Onyx publishes credit-style ratings of Web3 projects against a public, versioned methodology (currently v3.2). A rating is a professional opinion about credibility and operational quality at a point in time.
All ratings, methodology documents, watchlist cases, and editorial are public and require no account, payment, or wallet. A connected wallet is required only for write actions: submitting reviews, filing applications, and managing an account.
You may not: recreate the credibility seal in any material (see Press · brand rules), present Onyx data as your own rating product, scrape at volumes that degrade service, or state or imply that Onyx endorses, underwrites, or partners with a rated project.
Reviews are signed by a wallet and weighted by verified on-chain interaction with the reviewed project. You are responsible for what your keys sign. We remove reviews that are fraudulent, coordinated, or compensated — and we publish removal statistics quarterly.
Review fees purchase a place in the review queue and continuous monitoring. They do not purchase a score, a tier, a timeline advantage, or the softening of any finding. Fees are non-refundable when the outcome disappoints. This clause is repeated in every order form.
Ratings rely on public data, project disclosures, and third-party reports; any of these can be wrong or fraudulent. The service is provided as-is. To the extent Swiss law allows, our aggregate liability is capped at the greater of CHF 1,000 or fees you paid us in the prior 12 months.
Rating disputes follow the published dispute procedure (Methodology Sec. 12), not this section; legal disputes go to the courts of Zug, Switzerland. We version these terms like the methodology: changes are published with a diff 14 days before they take effect, and continued use is acceptance.
What we collect, why, for how long — and the larger list of what we deliberately don't.
You can read the entire site without telling us anything. If you connect a wallet, we store the address and what you sign here — both already public on-chain. We run no ad trackers, sell nothing, and our analytics can't identify you. Email us to see or delete what we hold.
Our ratings analyze public blockchain data, which may include addresses attributable to individuals. We process it under legitimate interest as a publisher. We do not de-anonymize readers or reviewers; forensic attribution appears only in watchlist cases, with evidence, about the entities we rate.
Under GDPR and the Swiss FADP you can request access, correction, deletion, and portability of your personal data via [email protected] — answered within 30 days. One limit: published reviews and watchlist evidence are journalistic records; we anonymize the requester where the law allows, but we do not rewrite the public record.
Servers in Switzerland and the EU (Zurich, Frankfurt). Transfers outside are covered by standard contractual clauses. Sub-processors are listed at /legal/subprocessors — currently four, and adding one requires the Independence Officer's sign-off if it touches ratings data.
The enforceable rules that keep money away from scores. This document is referenced in every employment contract, order form, and sponsorship agreement we sign.
Nobody who rates holds what they rate. Nobody who sells talks to anybody who scores. Sponsorship is capped, labeled, and can't buy a number. Breaking these rules ends your employment here, publicly. It has, twice.
Revenue functions (sales, marketplace, sponsorships) and ratings functions (analysts, reviewers, methodology) are separate teams with separate reporting lines. No employee holds roles in both. Revenue staff cannot view a rating before publication; ratings staff cannot view a client's billing status.
Paid placements are capped at 10% of annual revenue by board policy, always carry the flat "Sponsored" pill, never use the credibility shape language, and never appear on a project page, watchlist case, or methodology document. A sponsor's rating can go down while its campaign is running. One has.
Onyx will not issue a token, operate a fund, market-make, or take positions in assets it rates. The corporate treasury holds fiat, CHF/USD instruments, and the stablecoins needed for operations — the list is published in the annual report.
A policy is what it has actually done. Every enforcement action under this policy, since founding:
The Independence Officer (currently: Ingrid Halvorsen, General Counsel) owns this policy, reports to the board's independent directors, and cannot be dismissed without a board supermajority. The annual independence report — violations, gift log, revenue mix, screening statistics — publishes every March, unedited by the executive team.