Canonical: https://builtonarc.app/guides/how-we-verify-status # How we decide if a project is live on Arc Updated 2026-09-01. Every status on Built on Arc carries a source, a note and a date. Here is the evidence bar for live, testnet, announced and inactive. 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. ## Questions **Can a project pay to change its status?** No. Paid tiers change how an entry is labelled and where it can appear, never its status, its flags or its evidence. **What does inactive mean?** It means we observed no activity when we last checked. It is reversible — send us a source and we will re-check and re-date the entry. **How often do you re-check?** Statuses are re-checked on a rolling basis and every entry shows the date of its last check, so you can judge how stale it is.