Tokenomics Audit Desk

How the desk grades a token — methodology

Every audit this desk publishes — the nine free sample audits in the portfolio and every paid engagement — is produced by the same engine and the same rubric, whether the verdict comes back Sound or Fragile. This page is that rubric, in full: what is measured, where the numbers come from, how the score is built, and what the method cannot see.

1. What an audit examines

Five areas, each graded from measured data:

• Supply & issuance — total, circulating and maximum supply; whether supply is capped; who can create more of it (Solana mint authority, EVM contract owner).
• Vesting & unlock calendar — how much of the supply is still locked or unissued, and what dated unlock events sit ahead of the market.
• Holder concentration — how much of the supply the largest wallets control, and whether the issuer holds live privileges over holder accounts (Solana freeze authority, live contract owner).
• Value accrual — whether the protocol charges real fees, how large they are next to its valuation, and — only where the project's own documentation proves it — whether any of that value reaches token holders.
• Sell-pressure context — aggregate DEX liquidity and trading volume: how costly it would be for supply to actually exit.

A sixth section, market context (for example distance from all-time high), is reported for orientation and is never graded.

2. Where the numbers come from

All sources are public. The engine uses no paid feeds, no API keys, and no data a reader cannot check independently:

Chains covered: Base, Ethereum, Solana.

3. Findings — checkpoints and severity

The engine turns measurements into findings. Every finding carries a severity and cites the exact number that triggered it. The thresholds are fixed and published here:

Supply schedule & issuance

• No maximum supply published → HIGH
• Solana mint authority ACTIVE (issuer can mint at will) → CRITICAL; revoked → noted as a positive
• EVM contract owner renounced (zero address) → noted as a positive; live owner → MEDIUM (the owner's powers beyond the owner() read are UNKNOWN — the engine does not audit code)

Vesting & unlock calendar

• Less than 30% of total supply circulating → MEDIUM
• Market cap under 25% of FDV → MEDIUM
• Where a schedule is tracked: unlocks due inside 90 days above 25% of circulating supply → CRITICAL; above 5% → MEDIUM
• Schedule not tracked and not machine-readable → graded UNKNOWN with the missing evidence named (a published vesting schedule from the project's docs)

Concentration & governance risk

• Top holder above 20% of total supply → CRITICAL
• Top 10 holders above 50% → HIGH; above 30% → MEDIUM
• Solana freeze authority ACTIVE → HIGH
• Holder distribution unmeasurable → graded UNKNOWN, evidence named

Sell-pressure analysis

• Aggregate DEX liquidity under $25,000 → HIGH
• Zero DEX volume in 24 hours → MEDIUM

Holder shares are raw on-chain figures. The largest wallets may be contracts, exchanges, bridges or vesting vaults — the engine does not label wallets, and reports say so wherever a raw share is quoted.

Verdict. Any CRITICAL finding, or two or more HIGH findings → Fragile. Any HIGH or MEDIUM finding → Needs work. Otherwise → Sound.

4. The red-flag score (0–100)

The score is a deterministic composite of the measurements above — the same inputs always produce the same score. Higher means more red flags. It is a risk score, not a quality grade: a low score is the good outcome.

Total capped at 100. Bands:

Unlock events are scored on size, shape, and recipient. The overhang row above charges for locked supply in aggregate; it cannot tell one 6% cliff from sixty 0.1% drips, so dated events are scored separately. The largest scheduled event inside the audit window is measured against circulating supply — the basis the research uses: a study of more than 5,000 unlock events (6th Man Ventures) found unlocks of 0–1% of circulating supply had no meaningful price relationship, while larger unlocks correlated negatively, worsening with size. Events above 1% therefore add (size − 1) × 1.5 points, capped at 10.

Cliffs cost more than drips. The same research, corroborated by Keyrock's 16,000-event study, found the sharpest drawdowns precede large cliff distributions. An event released all at once adds a premium — +4 at 1–3% of circulating supply, +8 at 3% or more — that a linear release of the same size does not. A verified final tranche — the last release of a completed schedule, after which unlock overhang ends — takes the full size charge but half the cliff premium: the market sees the size, and the desk prices the size; what it does not do is charge a terminal event as if the pattern would repeat.

Who receives the tokens changes the charge. An unlock's risk depends on whose tokens they are. Following Tokenomist's published supply-pressure framework (employees sell 80–100%, investors 30–70%, treasury 0–20%), the size charge is multiplied by the recipient class's sell-through midpoint — team/employees 0.9, investors 0.5, treasury/foundation 0.1 — where the recipient is documented. Where the recipient class cannot be documented, the multiplier is 0.5 and the report says the class was undocumented.

Mostly-vested tokens earn a credit. Tokens with more than 70% of supply vested showed substantially lower volatility in the 6th Man data. The score credits that directly: −5 points when 90% or more of supply already circulates, −3 at 70–89%, applied once. The total never falls below 0.

Analysis sections alongside the score grade holder concentration (top-10 above 50% FAIL, above 30% WATCH, otherwise PASS), insider concentration (authority signals only — a true insider allocation percentage requires the project's published allocation documents and is marked UNKNOWN without them), unlock risk, value accrual (annualised protocol fees and fees-to-FDV where DefiLlama tracks them; whether fees reach holders is UNKNOWN without docs), and a comparison against a curated peer set for the token's sector, where one exists (marked UNKNOWN where none does).

5. How figures are verified

• The engine never invents. A value it could not measure is recorded as UNKNOWN, with the missing evidence named in the report — exactly as a measured value is recorded with its source.
• On-chain beats aggregator. Where the chain and an aggregator disagree, the report shows both figures, labelled by source.
• Published unlock figures are verified before they land. The desk's Unlock Watch grades dated unlock events in advance. Each figure is resolved from the project's own disclosures first; where a figure rests on an aggregator's structured schedule, the report says so and corroborates it against a second source before publication. This is not ceremony: on the Ethena calendar the desk caught and corrected a wrong recipient attribution carried by a major aggregator before the edition published, and every figure was re-verified against Ethena's disclosures before the Nov 2 and Nov 5, 2026 events.
• Snapshots are dated. Every report states when its data was accessed. Tokenomics change; a report describes the token as measured on that date.

6. Limitations — stated plainly

• Public sources only. No internal cap tables, no private agreements, no team-wallet labels beyond what sources publish.
• Not a security audit. No contract code, custody arrangement or operational security is reviewed.
• Documentation-dependent checkpoints — initial allocation splits, whether protocol fees reach holders, demand drivers — are graded in the manual review layer when the project's documentation supports a grade, and marked UNKNOWN when it does not.
• Unlock events are joined from the desk's own calendar. Dated events come from the Tokenomics Audit Desk's verified unlock calendar (each figure resolved from the project's disclosures or corroborated across two sources before it is scored) rather than the paywalled DefiLlama emissions feed the engine was first built on. Where no dated schedule can be verified, the unlock component is graded UNKNOWN and no event points are charged or credited — the score never guesses a calendar.
• Errors in source material can propagate. Reports cite their sources so any figure can be checked independently.
• No outcome guarantees. A Sound verdict does not imply a token will perform; a Fragile verdict does not imply it will fail. The grades describe supply mechanics as measured — nothing else.

7. The nine published sample audits

The rubric above, applied in public — produced free as the desk's portfolio, every figure sourced:

Read them in full: the audit portfolio.

Which rubric graded these samples. The nine samples above were graded under the 2026-10-13 rubric, before the event-scoring rules in §4 were adopted on 2026-10-27. Re-scored in shadow under the adopted rules, four move on the mostly-vested credit alone (AAVE 3.5 → 0, LDO 5.6 → 2.6, UNI 7.4 → 4.4, MORPHO 74.5 → 71.5), and the two samples with verified dated events move on event size and cliff premium (JTO 31 → 36.7, ZRO 44.5 → 56.1); no sample changes band under the adopted ruling. The published sample pages still state the scores the 2026-10-13 rubric produced — the desk will re-issue all nine under the upgraded rubric as a separate, deliberate step.

8. What a paid audit report contains

A full audit — $500, paid in USDC on Base; PDF report delivered in 48 hours — contains:

1. Cover: token, chain, contract, verdict, red-flag score, data-access date
2. Executive summary: the verdict and the three findings that matter most
3. Token snapshot: every measured value, labelled by source
4. Findings ranked by severity, each with its evidence
5. Analysis: holder concentration, insider concentration, unlock risk, value accrual, peer comparison
6. Methodology, limitations and disclaimers (this page, in short form)

Order or ask: audiauditdesk@gmail.com — payment instructions and a delivery slot come back by reply.

Independence: sample audits were produced without engagement from the projects reviewed. Paid grades are not influenced by the review fee.