Pharos Principles

Pharos has no token, takes no issuer money, sells no paid placement, and accepts no editorial trade. Sustainability comes from community support and, eventually, paid API access for heavy programmatic users. The code is MIT-licensed and the inbound funding ledger is published in full at /funding/.

Most trackers show what a stablecoin is worth right now. Pharos shows what could make it fail: backing, governance, freeze authority, dependency exposure, peg behavior, and exit liquidity. Price is the consequence; risk is the cause.

A reserve schedule is a balance sheet, not a permission system. If the issuer can blacklist addresses, freeze contracts, or pause transfers, those reserves belong to a holder only until the issuer says otherwise. FreezeWatch exists for that reason, and blacklist exposure is a first-class input into every safety grade.

An attestation that is signed by, hosted by, and refreshed by the same entity that custodies the assets is a self-portrait. Pharos treats issuer-controlled feeds as opaque until a third party with no commercial dependency on the issuer can corroborate the read.

Pharos classifies stablecoins by where the actual permission to mint, freeze, pause, and reconfigure lives. A coin with a decentralized front end and a centralized fallback is CeFi-dependent, regardless of what the marketing says. The classification is a description of the infrastructure, not a courtesy to the issuer.

A token designed to drift upward in value to capture yield is not pegged; it is a NAV instrument wearing the language of a stablecoin. Pharos flags these separately, withholds PegScore where the asset is not meant to hold a fixed price, and renders them in their own analytical surface.

Safety grades cap composite scores at the upstream asset the coin depends on. A stablecoin backed by a stablecoin backed by a money-market fund inherits the worst grade in that chain, not the best. The dependency map exists because the 2023 USDC depeg showed that derivative coins move with their collateral, whether they want to or not.

When a tracked stablecoin effectively dies, Pharos freezes the detail page rather than deleting it. The cemetery is a research surface, not a memorial. A dashboard that quietly forgets its failures cannot be trusted with the ones that have not failed yet.

Every score Pharos publishes carries a methodology version and a changelog link. When a formula changes, the version increments and the change is documented before the new number replaces the old one. The project changes its mind in public so that anyone who cited an earlier reading can verify what changed between then and now.

The dashboard, the worker pipeline, the scoring engines, and the data exports are MIT-licensed and reproducible. What is tracked is a curatorial decision, and the curation is published — additions land with explicit rationale, exclusions are documented when contested, and the inbound funding that supports the work is logged at /funding/ for inspection.