How we research and compare
Where ChainScouter's facts come from and what its fee, KYC, and country restriction labels mean.
Sources
Each fact on a protocol page comes from the protocol's own documentation, fee schedule, terms, or public API, and links to the page it came from. When two official pages disagree, the page dedicated to the topic wins over a summary. When neither is clearly current, we state only what both agree on. Where the documentation is silent, we read the product itself: its web app, its public market data, or the text its interface ships with. Something the documentation leaves out is reported that way, for example "the withdrawal fee is not published." A fact we could not confirm is marked "Not verified": read it as unknown, not as zero, free, or no KYC.
Each page shows when its facts were last checked, as one date or a range. The date moves only when someone rechecks a fact against its source. Rebuilding the site or loading a page never advances it.
Fees
The headline fee is the published base rate, before volume tiers, discounts, or rebates, for the account and market named in its scope. It leaves out funding, borrowing, price impact, network, and transfer costs, which the fee details describe where the protocol publishes them.
Identity checks
- No KYC: signing up and trading involve no identity step, and the terms do not reserve the right to ask for one. A third-party card provider's own checks do not change this.
- Checks may apply: the terms reserve an identity check, a withdrawal route needs ID, or one product mode requires KYC.
- KYC not confirmed: the identity requirements have not been verified.
Country restrictions
Restriction lists record the countries a protocol's current terms name. We do not add countries from sanctions lists the terms leave unnamed, so a count is a minimum, such as "5+ countries restricted", and "Sanctions rules only" means the terms name no country at all. A country barred from one product mode gets a note instead of a place on the list.
A country missing from a list is not confirmed as eligible, and a site that loads, including through a VPN, is not one you are allowed to use. Residence, citizenship, the product mode, and the funding provider can all matter, and these lists are not a legal assessment.
Market data
Open interest, trading volume, deposits, and fees come from DefiLlama and CoinGecko, which measure them from public blockchain and exchange data. Pages refresh them every 4 hours, and each figure names its source and the date it covers. They are not facts we check against a protocol's documentation, so they never change a page's Facts last checked date.
- Open interest is the value of open positions counted on one side: a $1,000 long matched by a $1,000 short counts once. DefiLlama reports it that way. Some exchanges publish both sides, which doubles the figure.
- Perpetual DEX volume is CoinGecko's. The 24h figure covers the last 24 hours, and the daily chart gives each UTC day's total, both converted from bitcoin to dollars at the time CoinGecko recorded them. The chart counts only deployments CoinGecko has tracked for the whole year and names any it leaves out.
- TVL (total value locked) is the value held on the exchange right now as DefiLlama measures it, not a running total of everything ever deposited. For a pool-based exchange it is the liquidity in its pools, labeled as such.
- Trading app volume and fees are DefiLlama's daily totals for complete UTC days, built from each app's fee wallets. A 30-day figure covers the 30 days up to the date shown. If the source lacks a day, the figure adds up the days it has and names the missing ones. Where an app's volume covers fewer chains than its fees, the page says which.
These figures are data, not rankings. We do not score or order protocols by them, and high volume alone does not mean a trade will fill at a good price. A figure a source fails to provide is left out, never shown as zero.
Assessments
"Our take", strengths, and watch-for sections are our assessments, written from the sourced facts and kept apart from them. A comparison without a written review shows the facts only and says so. There are no safety scores, star ratings, user reviews, or rankings built from reported volume.
Referrals
Referral relationships do not change which products we cover, the order they appear in, or what we say about them. How we make money.