How we decide if a project is live on Arc

A directory is only worth reading if you can tell where each claim came from. So every status here carries three things: a source URL, a one-line note on what we saw, and the date we saw it. If we cannot produce all three, we do not set the status.

Live

Live means we observed the product working for real customers on Arc mainnet. Not a demo video, not a press release, not a partner quote. Something a customer could actually use, doing what the entry says it does.

The evidence is usually one of: a transaction path we could follow, a product page where the Arc option is selectable, a changelog entry tied to an observable deployment, or a customer announcement we could corroborate against on-chain activity.

Testnet

Testnet means the flow works on Arc testnet and nothing more. This is genuine engineering progress and we record it as such — but it is not money moving, and we will not blur the two. Testnet entries frequently become live entries; that transition gets a new note and a new date.

Announced

Announced means an intention has been stated with nothing observable behind it yet. A blog post, a conference slide, a partnership press release. We record announcements because pretending they do not exist is its own distortion, but they render hollow, and they never count toward a live number anywhere on this site.

Inactive

Inactive means we looked and saw no activity: a dead deployment, an abandoned product page, a company that has moved on. It is a description of what we observed, not a verdict on the team, and it is reversible. Send us a source and we will re-check.

What the status is not

A status is not a safety rating. Live does not mean audited, solvent, well run or a good idea. We publish separate on-chain checks — contract verification, published audits, liquidity locks, reserve attestations — and only for the roles where those checks have meaning. A check marked not applicable is not a negative; it means the question does not apply to that project.

Nothing here is investment advice, and no amount of green dots should substitute for reading a project's own documentation and verifying its contract addresses yourself.

Where paid placement sits

Two tiers exist. The Editor's Index is our unpaid shortlist and cannot be bought. A Listing is a paid submission, labelled as such, and it never touches status, evidence, flags or the Index. We never use the word "verified" for evidence — when we mean evidence, we say observed or confirmed.

Paid placements are labelled, elevated and separated from editorial ranking. They never move a status, add or remove a flag, or influence an Editor's Index pick. Outbound links on paid and claimed entries carry a sponsored attribute; editorial entries do not.

Corrections

If a status is wrong, we would rather hear it than keep it. Reports go to the report page, and a project's own response can be published on its entry alongside the flag it responds to.