How we report crypto news: sourcing requirements, our review pipeline, and the line between reporting and hype.
Our Mission
AltcoinGordon reports on digital assets, blockchain technology, and the institutions building around them. Our job is to tell readers what actually happened — confirmed, sourced, and in context — not to promote any project, token, or exchange. We cover the industry with the same skepticism a financial reporter would bring to any other market, because that’s what crypto now is.
Sourcing Standards
Every published story is required to meet a minimum sourcing bar before it runs:
- Primary sources first. Exchange announcements, on-chain transactions, court filings, regulatory notices, and official company statements are weighted above secondary reporting.
- Institutional-grade data. Market and price data is drawn from established data providers rather than a single exchange feed.
- Independent corroboration, counted in the open. Every story carries the number of independent publishers reporting the same claim. A story with one publisher is New for its first 24 hours; if no independent corroboration has arrived by then it becomes Unproven. Two publishers is Developing, three or more is Verified. Three desks sit outside the scale entirely — Official, where the primary document is the source; Price, where a reading of the market is not a factual claim anyone could corroborate; and Briefing, our own analysis of stories we have already corroborated, which no outside publisher wrote and so none can confirm. We label which one applies on every story — see our Verification Center for how publishers are counted and what each status means.
- What we do not wait for. We do not hold a story until a second publisher confirms it. Most stories run on one publisher and say so on their face, marked New for their first 24 hours and Unproven after that if nothing else has arrived. Holding a first report until a competitor reprints it would mean measuring our timeliness by another newsroom’s schedule rather than our own judgement, and it would hide the one number we think is worth showing. The count is not a gate; it is the label. It rises on its own as further publishers file, with no one having to remember to update it.
- Named sources by default. We attribute claims to named organizations or individuals wherever possible. Anonymous sourcing is used sparingly and only where the underlying claim can still be independently corroborated.
Our Review Process
Draft
A story is drafted directly from primary sources and structured data — never from a single unverified headline.
Cross-Check
Every factual claim is checked against independent sources; contradictions are flagged for review rather than published as-is.
Count
Independent publishers reporting the same claim are counted by organisation, never by feed. What each one did with the claim — supports, contradicts, partial, or echo — is recorded alongside the count.
Publish
The story publishes with its count attached, whatever that count currently is. We do not hold a story back for want of corroboration — we publish it and say plainly how thin the evidence is. The status is then kept current: as further publishers report the same claim, the count rises and the label moves with it.
Editorial Independence
Coverage decisions are made on newsworthiness alone. AltcoinGordon does not accept payment in exchange for favorable coverage, and sponsored or company-submitted material is always published separately under our Press Releases desk — clearly labeled and excluded from our corroboration ranking and homepage feeds so it is never mistaken for independently reported news.
Use of Automation in Our Newsroom
AltcoinGordon uses an automated pipeline to monitor primary sources around the clock and assist with drafting — this lets us cover a fast-moving market continuously rather than on a traditional publishing schedule. Automation does not decide what is true. It monitors, drafts, and counts; the count and the status it produces are published as-is and shown to you rather than resolved behind the scenes. We are deliberate about this: a story with one publisher behind it goes live labelled Unproven, because a reader who can see that a claim is thin is better served than one who is left waiting or, worse, shown a confident-looking story with nothing behind it. We disclose all of this openly because we’d rather be transparent about how a story gets checked than have readers assume a byline they can’t verify.
What the Status Means
Every story and every tracked claim carries one number: how many independent publishers have reported the same thing. Not a score we assign, not a badge we award — a count you can check. The statuses follow from it: New (reported once so far, inside the first 24 hours), Unproven (that window has passed with no independent corroboration — a pending state, not a judgement), Developing (corroboration is accumulating, below the threshold), Disputed (credible sources disagree, which is a finding rather than a fault), Verified (three or more independent publishers agree, with no credible contradiction on record), and False (actively disproven).
Publishers are counted by organisation, never by feed: several syndicated feeds from one outlet count once, and a story that simply republishes another outlet does not count toward corroboration at all. The full method is on our Verification Center.
Corrections
We correct errors promptly and note them transparently rather than silently editing a published story. See our full Verification & Editorial Standards page for how corrections are handled, or contact the desk directly to flag an issue.