Formalizing Disclosure in Token Markets

Token markets have an unsolved information asymmetry problem.

When you buy a stock, you get a prospectus, a 10-K, and quarterly filings with audited numbers, disclosed insiders, and legally binding representations about material information. The disclosure burden may be imperfect, but the framework is legible. When purchasing a token, the burden of collecting this information from various governance forums, Discord channels, X/Twitter accounts, and blog posts falls on the holder. Market maker agreements, if they exist, are buried or undisclosed. This gap between what issuers know and what tokenholders can access is structural, and it has been the engine behind most of crypto's worst moments of the last decade.

Today, Blockworks launches the Transparency Alliance to address this directly.

The Alliance formalizes the Token Transparency Framework (TTF), which Blockworks first introduced in June 2025, into an industry-wide standard backed by the actual participants who control token capital markets. Founding members span exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Binance.US), custodians (Anchorage Digital, BitGo, Copper), market makers (GSR, FalconX, Auros), funds (Grayscale, VanEck, Bitwise), and protocols (Jito, Aerodrome, Aave). The logic follows that a framework only becomes a standard when the institutions controlling listings, diligence, and capital deployment are committed to enforcing it.

The TTF itself is organized into two filings. The B-1 serves as a baseline, functioning as the S-1 equivalent for digital assets. The B-2 is a continuously updated disclosure for mature protocols. Both are classification-agnostic, which removes the legal friction that has historically made founders reluctant to put anything in writing. Filings receive labels reflecting how much of the disclosure template has been filled in, not a qualitative grade. A "Partial" label is a legible signal to exchanges and tokenholders about what information remains unavailable. 

With Congress advancing the CLARITY Act, formal regulatory frameworks for token classification are moving to a near-term reality. Industry-led disclosure standards that precede regulation tend to shape it. The pattern has repeated itself across financial history, and in each case the voluntary standard came before the mandate.

In the early 1930s, the American Institute of Accountants began developing what would eventually become GAAP, years before the SEC formalized reporting requirements under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

ISDA followed the same logic in 1985, when the derivatives industry created a standard master agreement for OTC transactions because no regulatory framework existed and counterparties were negotiating contracts from scratch on every trade. By the time regulators caught up post-2008, the ISDA Master Agreement already governed the majority of the global derivatives market.

Reg FD in 2000 addressed the same insider/outsider asymmetry the TTF targets; the SEC's own adopting release documented years of selective disclosure practices funneling material information to analysts and institutions before the public, but it took documented, repeated abuse before regulation arrived.

In each case, the industry understood the problem long before legislation caught up. The TTF is the same bet that building the disclosure infrastructure now, with the institutions that control listings, diligence, and capital deployment behind it, shapes what the rules look like when they arrive. 

40+ protocols have completed filings since launch, including Jito, Morpho, Jupiter, dYdX, and ZKsync. What the TTF actually changes is not the theoretical availability of information, most of which was accessible in fragments, but the cost of finding it. Standardization collapses the research burden that has always fallen entirely on the buyer, replacing a scavenger hunt with a consistent surface against which every allocator, exchange, and tokenholder runs the same evaluation. Founders had little incentive to formalize information that gave them an edge, exchanges built proprietary diligence processes because nothing else existed, and tokenholders absorbed the losses that come with operating blind. The founding members of the Alliance collectively control who gets listed, market-made, and backed, and when those participants agree on a disclosure baseline, compliance stops being optional for projects that want access to serious capital.

— Nick

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