Transparency

Editorial firewall

Sponsorship moves a listing's placement on the page and adds a chip. It does not change the review, the grade, or the KYC tagging. If a sponsored provider's posture deteriorates, the grade drops and the chips change accordingly. We refund the unused portion pro-rata if you want out.

The list is the product; the ad slots are the byproduct.

Held funds disclosure. As of 2026-05-24 we are currently holding 1 XMR from a previous sponsorship payment (SplitNOW) during their re-test window — sponsorship was declined, refund instruction is pending from the operator. The funds sit separate from operational cash and do not influence the grade or the writeup. Disclosed here so the firewall is verifiable, not just stated.

Curator-built (first-party) disclosure

A few entries on this directory are operated by the same person who runs xmr.club — primarily kyc.rip (swap aggregator) and its sub-products. These carry a yellow CURATOR-BUILT chip. The chip is the disclosure: the rest of the listing is reviewed by the same rubric as any other entry.

Why even list them? Because they exist, they fit the no-KYC directory's remit, and pretending otherwise would be worse than open disclosure. If we wouldn't list a competitor with the same posture, we don't list ours either.

Affiliate posture

Unsponsored entries route through /go/<slug> which sets our affiliate code where the upstream provider has a program. Where they don't, the redirect is just a plain redirect. The affiliate code does not influence the grade or position.

No double-dip. Sponsored entries link directly to the provider — never through /go/. Once you've paid for placement we explicitly do not also collect affiliate on traffic we sent you.

Why we removed entries

We don't list KYC-required services, custodial wallets without published audits, or anything credibly accused of stealing user funds. We have removed entries that previously qualified. The list stays opinionated even when money's involved.

Where we make money

• Sponsorships — 4 tiers (Front-Page / Headline / Category / Featured). See /sponsor for current pricing and slot availability.
• Affiliate — set on unsponsored /go/ redirects where the provider has a program.
• That's it. No banner ads, no email harvest, no analytics-as-service (we run self-hosted Umami — see below).

Analytics we run

A privacy directory shipping a tracker is a tension we want to be honest about. Here is what we collect and why:

• Self-hosted Umami — served from p.xmr.club (first-party subdomain). Open source, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no PII. Collects only: path visited, referrer, screen-size bucket, browser/OS bucket, country (derived from IP, then IP discarded).
• Why — we need to know which categories visitors land on, which providers get clicks, which guides are read. Without that we can't prioritise the next 100 hours of curator work honestly.
• Tor visitors get a clean payload — our worker detects Tor exit traffic (Cloudflare's cf-ipcountry=T1) and skips emitting the Umami <script> tag entirely. No tracker-domain reference in the HTML they download. Same content, zero footprint.
• How to opt out (non-Tor) — any adblocker (uBlock Origin, Brave Shields, Privacy Badger) blocks Umami. JS-disabled browsers don't run it. We do not penalise visitors who block the tracker — same pages, same content.
• What we do NOT do — no Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar, no session replay, no Facebook/Meta pixel, no advertising-attribution pixels, no fingerprinting (FingerprintJS / similar), no behaviour profiling.

Infrastructure note: edge runtime is Cloudflare Workers + D1 + KV + R2. We don't publish a fixed "monthly bill" number — D1 read pricing shifts with query patterns, and unindexed scans can spike a single month into the hundreds of dollars. Sponsorships + affiliate cover infra + curator time; donations go to /donate.

Where the bias might live

We try to be honest about this. Three places where bias is structural, not malicious:

• Curator-built entries are reviewed by the same person who built them. The chip flags this; readers should weight accordingly.
• Sponsors get placement — that's what they paid for. The chip flags it.
• Affiliate-friendly providers stay on the radar more than equally-good providers without an affiliate program. We don't downgrade non-affiliates, but we test them less often.