AlphaAssay $ test my signal
RESEARCH · METHODOLOGY

How we grade ourselves — in public

ALPHAASSAY RESEARCH · 5 MIN READ

Every rating business faces the same temptation: grade generously, keep customers happy, quietly forget the misses. AlphaAssay counters part of that risk with demote-only application rules and signed-or-explicitly-untrusted snapshots. The current snapshot is deliberately narrower than an outcome score, and the publication path remains operator-controlled.

What calibration v0 actually publishes

The public payload contains a privacy-bucketed count of evaluated mature registrations, forward_outcomes.status=accumulating, and honesty=insufficient_history until a separately defined mature-outcome metric exists. It publishes no Brier score, base rate, survived/deflated count or hit rate.

The mechanics, in plain language

The public state. The endpoint is free and needs no account:

curl https://api.alphaassay.com/v1/public/calibration

How its trust state is exposed. A valid calibration snapshot carries named Ed25519 signature fields. If the snapshot is stale or unavailable, the response reports signed:false and a reason instead of serving unsigned history as trusted. Separately, our verdicts are demote-only in the application contract: no ordinary rule upgrades a grade after the fact. A signature authenticates one snapshot's bytes; it does not independently timestamp the record or prevent a later replacement.

What the fields mean. The bucket discloses only population size; accumulating says outcome evidence is still being collected; insufficient_history refuses to turn that state into a reliability claim. Authentication proves the published bytes, not an unpublished score.

Zero is an honest number

Today the counter is low — the ledger counts from day one, and we launched recently. The service publishes the current snapshot; a reviewer can keep a retained copy and compare it with later versions.

Pre-registration creates tenant state immediately and is queued for later daily operator-published chain inclusion. The immediate response is not an inclusion proof or an independent timestamp. That stronger time claim requires a separately pinned external anchor. Signed certificates remain separately verifiable. Don't trust an examiner who won't be examined — retain and compare the evidence.