---
title: How the Hardy Index makes money
url: "https://hardyindex.com/how-we-make-money"
updated: 2026-08-12
---

# How we make money

The Hardy Index publishes independently and earns through disclosed affiliate links and labelled sponsorship in its guides. No commercial relationship affects a rating, a score or a tier.

> This is a security-readiness assessment, not investment advice.

## The short version

The Hardy Index rates blockchains and does not sell ratings. It earns money in the guide layer, through affiliate links that are labelled where they appear and sponsorship that is labelled "Sponsored". The ratings, the methodology and the chain profiles carry no commercial content of any kind, apart from a single labelled module on each profile that links to guidance and never to a product.

## What earns money

- **Affiliate links in the guides.** Where a guide recommends a product, some links earn a commission if you buy. Those links sit inside a labelled module with a disclosure line directly above them, and each product is listed with what it does not fix.
- **Sponsorship in the guide layer.** A sponsor can pay for a labelled placement on a guide, marked "Sponsored" and dated. A sponsor never appears on the index, on a chain profile, on the methodology page, or anywhere else a Hardy Score is visible.

## What never earns money

- **Ratings.** No chain, foundation, exchange or issuer can pay for a rating, a review, a tier, a position in the ranking or an expedited assessment.
- **The index, the methodology, the chain profiles and the changelog.** These pages carry no affiliate links and no advertising.
- **Coverage decisions.** Which chains are rated, which are held back and when a score changes are editorial decisions made against the published rubric.
- **Corrections.** Nobody can pay to have a correction published, delayed or removed.

## How the separation is enforced

- **The scores are arithmetic.** A Hardy Score is computed from six published dimension scores and six published weights, so there is no stored score a commercial arrangement could touch.
- **Commercial content lives in one module.** Every partner and every sponsorship is declared in a single file that the rating code does not import.
- **Affiliate links are marked at the source.** A commercial link is emitted with rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" and a visible label.
- **No trackers.** No affiliate scripts, no pixels, no advertising network and no retargeting. The one measurement script is Google Analytics, which counts page views, loads nothing until a reader accepts it, and cannot see which link was clicked or what was bought. See https://hardyindex.com/cookies.md.
- **Products are chosen editorially.** A place in a guide cannot be bought, and products that earn nothing are listed on the same terms as products that do.

## Current arrangements

As of 12 August 2026:

- **Trezor Safe 7.** Affiliate arrangement. The Hardy Index may earn a commission if you buy through our link.
- **Ledger.** Affiliate arrangement. The Hardy Index may earn a commission if you buy through our link.
- **The QRL wallet.** No commercial arrangement. Included on merit, and it earns us nothing.

No sponsorship has been sold. When a placement runs, the sponsor is named here as well as on the page it appears on.

## Positions and conflicts

The Hardy Index holds no position that a rating could move. Affiliate arrangements are with wallet and hardware makers, which this index does not rate. The index rates layer-1 blockchains, and no company that could appear in the ranking earns us anything.

## How to hold us to this

Send corrections, with the primary source that contradicts us, to index@hardyindex.com. Corrections are published at https://hardyindex.com/changelog with a reason and a source.