Methodology

The criteria are published first

The criteria by which every venue is categorised are published and versioned before any venue is measured against them, applied evenly to every row, and changed only through a changelog entry with a source. That order is the point: criteria written after the fact can be shaped to a conclusion, and criteria that change silently are a re-scoring nobody can audit.

Three pillars, no fourth

• Price — what credit costs here, and whether the rate is discovered or set.
• Quality — what stands behind a position, and what can change under the reader.
• Composition — who and what makes up this market.

No score, ever

There is no composite score, no stars, no ranking and no reliability index. A reader weighs the criteria; this site does not weigh them for the reader. Tables are not sorted by rate by default and no venue is floated. A single number would also be the thing that makes this a benchmark rather than a description, which it is not and will not become.

Unknown is a value

A criterion that cannot be established from public sources reads unknown with its reason — never guessed, never quietly dropped. A criterion that does not apply to a venue's class reads as the class-specific answer instead, which is informative in itself: a CeFi desk's upgradeability is "terms changeable by the operator at notice", which is a different statement from "unknown", and the two are never conflated. How a fact is known travels with the fact.

Every venue, the same row

The Gavel Protocol appears in this dataset as one venue among the others, produced by the same pipeline from the same criteria. Where it is weak — book depth, external counterparty count, months live — its row says so with the same plainness as anyone else's. The rows where a venue looks good are only believable if the rows where it does not are visible.

Coverage

As of 2026-08-29, 162 venues are in the registry and 15 of 20 contributed to the current reading. A venue absent from a reading is a declared gap in observation, not an observation of zero.

Machine access

The same data is served to agents over MCP at https://mcp.bitcoincreditstack.com/mcp, read-only. Nothing on that server signs, submits, broadcasts or prepares a transaction.

Disclosure

Operated by Aletheia Analytics SASU, which also created the Gavel Protocol (a venue covered by this data) and participates on it own-account.