Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and the operator of Scienter (“we”, “us”), the service at scienter.xyz and its subdomains.

Scienter is operated by its founder, Iliya, as an individual based in Israel. No separate company has been incorporated for it. We say so plainly rather than implying a corporate counterparty that does not exist, because who you are contracting with is something you are entitled to know before you contract.

By visiting the site, reading a scorecard, subscribing to a paid plan, or using any feed, alert, bot or API we provide, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the service. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company or fund, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

You must be old enough to form a binding contract where you live, and you must not be a person or entity that applicable sanctions law prohibits us from dealing with.

Scienter reads public blockchain data and public exchange data, and publishes analysis of it: wallet forensics, rug and exploit detection, MEV attribution, provider reliability rankings, and composite scorecards that grade the track records of traders and vaults. Some of that analysis is free to read. Some is behind a paid plan. All of it is an information product.

Three things the service deliberately is not, and will not silently become:

• It does not take custody. We never ask for, hold or accept a private key, a seed phrase, an exchange API key with withdrawal rights, or a deposit of funds or assets of any kind. Anyone asking you for those in our name is not us.
• It does not execute trades. The product places no orders on your behalf. Where a page links out to a venue, you leave our site and transact there under that venue’s own terms, with your own keys, on your own decision.
• It does not manage money. We are not your broker, your dealer, your adviser or your fiduciary, and nothing in these terms or in the product creates any of those relationships.

We may add, change or withdraw features. Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan includes, clause 11 applies.

Signals, scorecards and wallet analysis are for informational purposes only. Not investment advice. Do your own research.

Everything we publish is general and impersonal. It is the same for every reader on a given plan, produced on a regular schedule, and it is not tailored to anyone. We do not know your positions, your risk tolerance, your tax position, your time horizon or your objectives, and we do not collect them. Nothing we publish is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset, or an offer or solicitation to do so.

That is a description of how the service operates, and it is the description the publisher’s exclusion recognised in Lowe v. SEC, 472 U.S. 181 (1985) turns on: bona fide publications of general and regular circulation, impersonal and not tailored to any individual, sit outside the definition of an investment adviser. We are stating how we operate, not giving a legal opinion — not to you about your own regulatory position, and not to ourselves about ours. Whether that holding reaches any particular use is a question for counsel rather than for a paragraph on a website.

Our own record is published, including the parts that lost money. The signal engine returned a Sharpe of −0.14 over a 90-day backfill and we say so on /about rather than quietly. Read it before deciding what a score on this site is worth. Past performance does not predict future returns, and that applies to us first.

Our output is derived from third-party and public data: chain indexers, block explorers, exchange APIs and price feeds. That data can be delayed, incomplete, reorganised, mislabelled or simply wrong, and our own models can be wrong on correct data. Scores are statistical estimates about the past, not findings of fact about a person.

Where the product names or grades a wallet, address, protocol, trader or vault, it is stating what the data shows and how we measured it — not making an accusation about anyone’s intent or conduct. Do not present our output as a legal conclusion, a due diligence sign-off, or an allegation of wrongdoing against an identified person, and do not rely on it as the sole basis for a decision that matters.

We correct material errors when we find them or when you tell us about one. Analysis already published to the Alpha Ledger is by design an immutable record of what we said and when; a correction is published alongside it rather than in place of it.

Some features require an account and a paid plan. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Seats are per-person; do not share one.

Payments are handled by third-party processors — currently Whop, and Lemon Squeezy for certain plans. Card and bank details go to them, not to us; we see a customer reference, a plan and a status. Their terms govern the payment itself, and their privacy notices govern the payment data.

Paid plans renew automatically until cancelled. You can cancel at any time and keep access to the end of the period you have already paid for; we do not charge a cancellation fee. Prices exclude taxes, which are added where required. We give at least 30 days’ notice before a price change takes effect on a renewal, and continuing past that renewal is acceptance of the new price.

Where we earn a share of exchange fees or a referral commission from a venue you reach through our links, we disclose it on the page that carries the link. It costs you nothing extra and it does not change what we publish about that venue.

You agree not to:

• resell, redistribute, sublicense or republish our data, scores or research as a feed or product of your own;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download beyond your plan’s documented limits, or evade rate limits, gates or authentication;
• reverse-engineer, probe, load-test, or interfere with the service or the infrastructure it runs on;
• present our output as your own original research, or strip the attribution and disclosures from anything you quote;
• use the service to harass, defame, dox or threaten anyone, or to present a score as an accusation of criminal conduct against an identified person;
• use the service to build a competing dataset by systematic extraction, or to train a model on our output without written permission;
• use the service where doing so breaks the law that applies to you, including sanctions, market abuse and securities law.

Quoting a scorecard, citing a finding with a link, or screenshotting a public page in commentary or journalism is fine and encouraged. The line is between citing us and becoming a substitute for us.

We keep all rights in the software, the scoring methodology, the models, the written analysis and the branding. Your plan grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the service and its output for your own internal purposes while the plan is active. Nothing transfers ownership.

Raw public blockchain data is nobody’s property, including ours. What we claim is the analysis, the structure and the presentation, not the underlying chain history.

Entries published to the Alpha Ledger are public by design and may be read, quoted, cited and independently verified by anyone, including to check whether we were wrong. That is the point of publishing them.

If you send us feedback or a suggestion, we may use it without obligation to you. If you believe something on the site infringes your rights, write to [email protected] with enough detail to identify it and we will look at it.

We aim for continuous availability and do not guarantee it. Maintenance happens, upstream data providers fail, venues go down, and this is a service run by a very small team. There is no uptime SLA on a self-serve plan. Where a paid feature is materially unavailable for an extended period, write to us and we will make it right.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent the law allows — express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We are not liable for trading losses. You decide what to do with your money, on your own keys, at your own risk. We are also not liable for lost profits, lost opportunity, lost or corrupted data, or any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, however caused, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the fees you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or US$100.

Nothing here excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

You will indemnify and hold us harmless against claims, losses, liabilities and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms, your breach of applicable law, or your republication of our output — including any claim brought by a third party you named, graded, accused or acted against on the strength of something you read here.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we want covered, and you may control the defence of it provided you do not settle in a way that admits fault on our behalf or binds us without our consent.

You may stop using the service at any time, and cancel a paid plan from your billing settings.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, that we are legally required to terminate, or that is being used to damage the service or other users. Where we can give notice first without making the problem worse, we will.

If we terminate a paid account without cause, or materially reduce what a paid plan includes and you do not accept the change, we refund the unused portion of the current period. Clauses 4, 7, 9, 10 and 12 survive termination.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Israel, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The competent courts of Tel Aviv-Jaffa have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them or from your use of the service.

If you are a consumer resident in a jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally or to the protection of mandatory local consumer rules, this clause does not take that away.

Before filing anything, write to us. Most disputes about an information product are a misunderstanding about what the product claims, and those are cheaper to fix in an email than in a filing.

We may update these terms as the product changes. When we do, the last updated date at the top changes with them. Material changes are notified by email or in the app before they take effect, and continuing to use the service after that is acceptance.

We do not backdate. A change takes effect from the date it is published, not retroactively over anything you have already paid for or already read.

These terms, together with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service. If a clause is held unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read down to the minimum change that makes it enforceable. Our not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them to a successor entity, including the company that Scienter is incorporated into, on notice to you.

Questions about these terms, licensing, enterprise agreements or a correction request: [email protected].