The firewall
Four sentences. Everything else on this page is those four sentences applied to a specific situation.
No listing fee, no submission fee, no expedited review, no sponsorship, no consideration of any kind — direct or indirect — is accepted from an issuer, its affiliates, or anyone acting for it, in connection with index membership. Membership is determined solely by the eligibility criteria in the methodology spec.
A constituent may separately be a paying API customer. That is a normal commercial relationship and it buys data access and nothing else. It does not affect eligibility, weight, review order, or an appeal.
No position in any Paddock ranking, index, leaderboard, category table or best-value surface is for sale. There is no promoted slot, no sponsored row, no preferential ordering, and no advertising inside a ranked surface.
Where a ranking has a composite score, the formula is published and applies identically to every row. get_best_value_provider's composite is published in the route and in the docs for exactly this reason: a score whose formula is private is a score that can be quietly adjusted.
If an exchange, a HIP-3 perp deployer, a structured-product issuer, or any other prospective or existing licensee makes the licence — its signature, its renewal, its fee, or its scope — conditional on adding, removing, reweighting or retaining a constituent, Paddock refuses the licence. Not negotiates it, not records the request and proceeds anyway: refuses. An existing licence is terminated on the same ground.
The same answer covers the softer forms: pre-publication sight of a provisional list beyond what is published to everyone at T−5, input into eligibility or weighting, a private methodology variant, or a rebalance held, accelerated or altered because a licensee holds exposure that it would move. The calendar runs on its own dates.
A licence refused or terminated on this ground is published — what was asked for, and that the answer was no. A refusal nobody hears about deters nobody.
Paddock does not run a marketplace or an exchange, does not act as an x402 facilitator or settle anyone's payments, and does not operate a gateway, router or proxy through which agent payments pass. It takes no fee on any transaction it grades, receives no referral or revenue-share consideration for directing an agent to a provider, holds no position in any constituent token, and holds no position, fee or revenue share in any instrument settled against its own index.
Paddock grades counterparties. It does not route business to them. This is the rule the other three protect: a grader paid on the flow it grades has an interest in the grade, and no disclosure fixes that — only not having the interest does. It is also why verify_before_pay is priced as a query: the fee is the same whether the verdict is pass or fail, so the answer cannot be worth more than the truth.
A conflict policy is only worth anything if a reader can hold it against a specific fact and get a yes or a no. Each rule above is written to be failable: it names a thing Paddock could do, and says Paddock does not do it. A principle that cannot be breached cannot be checked.
What Paddock does take money for
Stated positively, so the boundary is checkable.
| Revenue | From | Affects the index? |
|---|---|---|
| API subscriptions (Builder, Pro Agent) | any caller, including constituents | no |
| Per-query payments (x402, MPP) | any caller | no |
| The monthly report | readers | no |
| Index licensing | a licensee running a product against the index | no — see §04.3 |
Nobody in that table can buy a constituent's inclusion, weight, ranking or appeal outcome. That is the whole test.
Licensees
A licensee — an exchange, a HIP-3 perp deployer, a structured-product issuer — pays for the right to settle against a published index. That relationship creates two specific hazards, and both are closed by rule 3.
A licensee cannot influence constituents. No licensee gets pre-publication access to a provisional list beyond what is published at T−5 to everyone, input into eligibility or weighting, or a private methodology variant. A licensee that makes the licence conditional on any of those does not get a negotiation; it gets a refusal, and the refusal is published.
A licensee's position is not Paddock's concern, and must not become one. If a licensee holds exposure that a rebalance would move, that is not a ground for delaying, accelerating, or altering a rebalance. The calendar runs on its own dates. The only permitted holds are the data-quality holds in §02.5, and those are published with their reason.
Paddock takes no position, fee, or revenue share in any instrument settled against its own index. This follows directly from rule 4.
The denylists
The circular/flagged and facilitator denylists remove settlement from attribution, so they move weights. Two safeguards.
No party may pay to be added to, or removed from, either list. A wallet's presence is determined by the published detection methodology and by evidence, including evidence supplied through the appeals process at the §03.2 standard.
Changes require founder approval and are never automatic. The weekly detector may prepare a change and open it for review; it may not land one. A run that only refreshes dates and volumes merges itself, because it changes no membership. A run that adds or removes a wallet is escalated with a plain-English summary of who moved and how much settlement it carries.
Disclosure
- Any commercial relationship between Paddock and a constituent, appellant, or licensee is disclosed in the relevant decision record and in the constituent table.
- Paddock publishes its own bad news. Corrections to published figures go in the public corrections log whether or not anyone noticed. This is a standing brand rule, not an index-specific one.
- Affiliation is disclosed at the bottom of anything public.
If a rule here is broken
The breach is published — what happened, which figures were affected, and what changed to prevent a repeat — in the corrections log if a published figure or its basis moved, and in the appeals register if a decision was affected.
The same applies to the rules themselves. These four sentences are inside the corrections-log scope. Changing one is a dated entry naming the old wording and the new, not an edit to a page. A firewall that can be reworded quietly is not a firewall.
A conflict policy with no failure path is a marketing document. This one has one.