Skip to content
FIELDNOTES — home

Publication

Editorial policy

The rules by which our articles are prepared and corrected. They apply to all articles, the glossary and the newsletter.

In effect since October 16, 2026.

Purpose

FIELDNOTES explains how systems work, along with concepts, limitations and risks. We do not recommend using specific services, do not persuade readers to choose a platform and do not help make trading decisions. The publication is commissioned by the Variational team; how this affects our work is described in the “Conflict of interest” section. The publication is in English.

Sources

We rely on specific pages, not on search snippets or secondhand summaries:

  • for claims about Variational — the project’s official documentation and dated publications;
  • for technology — protocol and network documentation and publications by central banks, regulators, international organizations and research groups;
  • for events — primary documents (regulators’ press releases, court filings) or publications with a publication date.

A link is placed next to the claim it supports, and the full list of sources with the fact-check date appears at the end of the article. We do not link to trading applications or to sign-up, deposit or referral pages — even when these are the project’s official addresses.

Attribution of claims

We report the project’s claims about its own advantages — for example, about fees, spreads, liquidity depth or a solution being “the first” — as claims: “according to the project’s documentation,” “according to the team.” If there is no independent confirmation, we say so directly. We separate fact, interpretation and assumption, and we specify which product a claim refers to: the protocol, the Omni application or Pro, which has not launched.

Fact-checking

Every material claim is entered into an internal source register: the wording, the link, the date checked, the date of the event and a status — “confirmed,” “needs clarification” or “sources disagree.” If sources contradict each other, we do not quietly pick the convenient version: we look for a more precise dated confirmation or point out the discrepancy in the text.

Numbers and words such as “now,” “recently” and “for the first time” are checked separately and come with a date. We do not publish rumors about tokens, listings, airdrops or future features.

Publication and update dates

The publication date is the day an article first appears. The update date changes only with a substantive edit: a fact, conclusion or number has changed, or a section has been added. Fixing a typo or layout does not change the update date. The fact-check date shows when the sources were last reviewed.

Corrections

You can report an error through the link at the end of any article or via the contact page. We check each report against the primary source. If the error is confirmed, we correct the text, change the update date and add a note at the end of the article stating what was wrong and when it was corrected. Significant corrections are mentioned in the next newsletter issue.

What we do not publish

  • investment advice, trading signals, asset picks, or recommendations on leverage and entry or exit timing;
  • price forecasts, technical analysis or financial calculators, including calculations of a reader’s returns;
  • instructions for signing up, connecting a wallet, funding an account or opening positions;
  • rankings of crypto services, brokerage reviews or comparisons that encourage choosing a provider;
  • advertising slogans, trading success statistics, testimonials or other social proof;
  • content about tokens, airdrops, points or referral programs.

Comparing architectures — for example, request for quote (RFQ), automated market makers and order books — is acceptable as an explanation of principles, without evaluating platforms.

Conflict of interest

The publication is commissioned by the Variational team, so we have an obvious conflict of interest in articles about the project. We disclose it on the About page and offset it with rules: attribution of claims, mandatory mention of the limitations and risks described in the documentation, and no trading links or promotional wording. The newsletter serves only to deliver our articles: subscribers are not passed into a trading funnel.

Use of AI

AI-based tools are used to prepare drafts, find discrepancies between sources and proofread. They are not a source of facts: every claim is checked against the page the article links to. Generated images, if any appear, will be labeled as illustrations and will not be presented as documentary photographs.

Images and diagrams

We use photographs with confirmed terms of use (free Creative Commons licenses and the public domain) and credit the author, source page and license in the caption. Diagrams of mechanisms are drawn by the editorial team; they show how a process works, not market data.