How the Altitude Production Ledger works: statuses, evidence grades, and the Altitude Intelligence Index

Methodology v1 — 2026-07-16. This page is versioned: when a definition or formula changes, the version number changes and the old text stays in the public record.

The Altitude Production Ledger tracks institutional blockchain and tokenization initiatives — bank settlement networks, tokenized funds, market-infrastructure rebuilds — from the day they are announced to the day they demonstrably process real value, or the day the evidence goes quiet. Financial institutions announce; far fewer ship. The ledger measures the distance between the two.

What counts as an initiative

A named program by an identifiable operator intended to move real financial activity onto blockchain rails: a settlement network, a tokenized fund or security, a clearing platform, a stablecoin rail. Marketing partnerships without a named system, and pure research papers, do not qualify.

The status taxonomy

Every initiative holds exactly one current status. Statuses only move forward, or to abandoned; corrections are published as such, never silently rewritten.

| Status | Meaning | |---|---| | announced | A public commitment exists; no evidence of a working system. | | pilot | A working system is exercised in a limited test — internal, sandboxed, or with named test participants. | | limited-production | Real value moves for real counterparties, but restricted — capped volumes, a small participant set, or a single asset class. | | production | The system is generally available to its intended market and processing real value. | | scaled | Sustained material volume relative to the operator's own stated ambitions for it. | | abandoned | The operator has said it stopped, or a shutdown is otherwise documented. |

What we never do: declare a project dead because it is quiet. An initiative with no public evidence of activity for 18 months (and not yet in production) is flagged stalled — a derived observation, stated as exactly that: "no public evidence of activity since \<date>." Moving a record to abandoned requires documentary evidence.

Evidence grades

Every status assignment carries a grade for the strongest evidence behind it:

| Grade | Meaning | Examples | |---|---|---| | T1 | Independently verifiable by anyone | an on-chain transaction, a reproducible query against public data | | T2 | A primary document | a regulatory filing, a regulator's notice, the operator's own formal announcement | | T3 | Credible secondary reporting | named-outlet journalism |

The hard rule: a production-tier status (limited-production, production, scaled) requires T1 or T2 evidence. Press coverage alone never puts an initiative in production on this ledger. Many institutional chains are private, where T2 documents are the honest ceiling — we say so rather than inferring on-chain facts we cannot check.

The Altitude Intelligence Index

AII = the share of tracked initiatives, announced at least 180 days ago, that have ever reached a production-tier status on T1/T2 evidence.

The 180-day gate exists so that fresh announcements don't count against anyone — a project announced last month hasn't failed, it's early. Companion metrics, computed the same way on every update:

• Announcement-to-production lag: median months from announcement to first production-tier evidence, among initiatives that crossed.
• Stalled count: initiatives currently carrying the derived stalled flag.

Every number the ledger publishes traces to a claim record with its evidence attached, and every metric is recomputed by code from those records — the queries are named in each metric's provenance so the computation can be reproduced.

Corrections

If you operate a tracked initiative and believe a status is wrong, send primary evidence — a filing, an official notice, a transaction — and the record will be updated and the change logged publicly. That is not a concession; it is the mechanism working as designed.

As one concrete application of these rules, BUIDL is recorded at production on independently verifiable T1 evidence. ¹