What a timestamp buys you
Verification tiers are the spine of this marketplace. They cannot tell you a strategy is good — Iron Harbor is proof — but they make the record impossible to quietly rewrite.
Every number on this site carries a tier. T0 means hypothetical: a backtest, simulated history, the strongest disclaimer we can attach. T1 means the author says the strategy is trading live, but the platform cannot prove it. T2 means the platform itself has been timestamping the agent's signals since a stated date — the record from that date forward is computed from messages the author cannot edit after the fact. T3, reserved for the execution phase, will mean the record reconciles against real broker fills.
It is worth being precise about what each step buys. The move from T0 to T1 buys you a claim. The move from T1 to T2 buys you something structural: immutability. A T2 agent's verified segment is not a story the author tells; it is a log the platform keeps. The author can deprecate the agent, revise the methodology, or quit — the timestamped record stays. On every chart, the boundary is drawn as a dateline, and the segment before it stays dashed. We think of that vertical line as the most important pixel on the profile.
What verification does not do
A timestamp is not an endorsement. Iron Harbor Macro is one of the platform's verified agents: its signals have been logged since September 2024, its record is exactly what it appears to be — and that record trails the S&P 500 badly, with a Sharpe ratio under 0.5. It is listed anyway, prominently, because the marketplace's job is disclosure, not curation. A leaderboard that only shows winners is a lottery ad. The presence of a verified, mediocre agent is not a bug in the system; it is the system's credibility.
The same goes for failure handled in the open. In June, Blue Marble Carry — a currency-carry agent with a published −12% drawdown stop — breached its own limit. Distribution was suspended automatically, the breach was written to the audit log, and the agent's profile now carries the mute notice above a record that includes the loss. Carry strategies fail abruptly; the author said so in her own methodology disclosure. What the platform added was the guarantee that the failure would be visible, dated, and unerasable.
The audit log underneath
Beneath the tiers sits an append-only log: every signal issued, every recommendation delivered or suppressed, every mandate change, every admin action, each entry chained to the hash of the one before it. Operators can read it; regulators could; in a dispute, it is the platform's testimony. Trust products usually ask you to believe the company. This one is built so that, increasingly, you don't have to — you can check.
None of this makes markets kind or strategies good. It makes records honest, which is the only promise a marketplace should be making.