Sourcing Policy

Last updated: October 6, 2026

A citation has to support a specific claim. Linking a publisher’s topic page and calling the article “sourced” is not a citation, and it is the single most common way reference sites overstate how well-evidenced they are. This page sets out what we require instead.

1. Minimum requirements

Every article must carry:

  • at least four citations,
  • drawn from at least three distinct domains,
  • including at least one primary source.

These are enforced automatically. An article that fails them does not publish.

2. What counts as a primary source

A primary source speaks with its own authority rather than reporting on someone else’s:

  • Issuer disclosures — Tether’s transparency and attestation reports, Circle’s reserve reports, and equivalent filings.
  • Regulators, courts and legislatures — the SEC, CFTC, state attorneys general, the US Treasury and FinCEN, the Federal Register, EUR-Lex and ESMA, the Bank of England and FCA, MAS, the FSA, the BIS and FATF.
  • On-chain data — contract state and supply read from block explorers and node APIs.

3. Reputable secondary sources

Established financial and crypto press — Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, The Block — may support claims, but cannot be the only backing for a factual assertion about reserves, supply, or legal status.

4. What we reject outright

  • Index pages. Tag, topic, category, author, search and feed URLs. A page whose contents change under you cannot evidence a fixed claim.
  • Bare hostnames. A link to a site’s front page points at no document.
  • Dead links. Citation URLs are checked for reachability. A URL we cannot confirm exists is not cited.
  • Circular sourcing. Other wikis, content farms, and aggregators that merely restate a claim without evidencing it.
  • Promotional material presented as independent verification, including issuer marketing pages used to support claims about that issuer’s reserves.

5. Attestation is not audit

We are deliberately careful with this distinction, because it is routinely blurred. An attestation is a point-in-time report in which an accounting firm states that figures management provided agree to underlying records on a given date. An audit is a broader opinion on financial statements over a period. Tether publishes attestations. Where an article refers to them, it says “attestation” and names the firm and the date.

6. How citations appear

Citations are numbered in the text and listed under References at the foot of the article, each with its publisher and, where known, its publication date. Primary sources are marked as such. Where a source is likely to change or disappear, an archived copy is linked alongside it.

7. Reporting a bad citation

If a citation does not support the claim it is attached to, that is an error and we want to know. Email editorial@tetherwiki.com with the page and the reference number. Confirmed cases are fixed and recorded in the corrections log.