Most crypto data sites track price. TokenSonar tracks something different — the actual adoption of blockchain infrastructure by banks, governments, and financial institutions. Here's exactly how the scores work, where the data comes from, and why we built it this way.
The Problem We're Solving
Institutional adoption is the most important signal in crypto that nobody is tracking properly. You can find price charts everywhere. But if you want to know which banks are actively using XRP today, or whether Hedera's institutional momentum is accelerating or stalling, or whether a new ETF filing is from a tier-1 issuer or a small fund — that intelligence simply didn't exist in one place.
TokenSonar was built to answer one question: which blockchains are actually being adopted by the institutions that will drive the next decade of growth?
How the Pipeline Works
Event Type Weights
Not all news is equal. A regulatory license granted by the FCA is a fundamentally stronger signal than a blog post announcing a partnership. Here's how we weight each event type:
| Event Type | Base Points | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| License granted | 18 pts | Regulatory approval is the strongest institutional signal |
| ETF approved/live | 14 pts | Regulated institutional money entering the asset |
| Institution adopts live | 12 pts | Named bank or government actively using the chain |
| Regulatory guidance | 8 pts | Regulatory clarity without formal approval |
| Partnership announced | 7 pts | Integration or commercial agreement signed |
| General news | 3 pts | Coverage and mentions — directional signal only |
Institution Tier Weights
The institution behind an event matters as much as the event type. A Goldman Sachs pilot carries far more weight than an unknown startup's announcement:
| Tier | Bonus Points | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereign / Central Bank | +20 pts | Fed, ECB, BIS, IMF, national governments |
| G-SIB Banks | +15 pts | JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman, HSBC, Deutsche Bank |
| Tier-2 Institutions | +10 pts | Fidelity, Visa, Mastercard, Franklin Templeton |
| Large Fintechs | +6 pts | Coinbase, Circle, Fireblocks, Stripe |
| Any Named Institution | +2 pts | Any identified company beyond generic "a bank" |
Source Credibility Weights
Recency Decay
News from yesterday matters more than news from three weeks ago. We apply exponential decay with different half-lives depending on the event type — a license grant remains relevant for 30 days, while a general news mention decays in 5 days.
Logarithmic Normalization
We use a logarithmic scale for the final boost calculation. This prevents 50 mediocre news stories from outscoring 2 landmark events — which is exactly what a naive counting system would produce.
The formula: boost = min(35, round(log(1 + rawScore) × 4.5))
This means a single JPMorgan license grant story from the FCA — scoring ~45 raw points — produces approximately a +17 boost. Twenty low-importance blog posts scoring ~60 raw points combined produce about the same. Quality beats quantity.
Why the base score matters: Each coin starts with a base score reflecting its structural institutional adoption — existing licenses, ETF status, known institution count. This doesn't change daily. The live boost (0–35 pts) is layered on top, reflecting current momentum. A coin with a strong base but quiet news week will hold its score. A coin with a weak base but a major license grant this week will spike.
Auto-Discovery and Retirement
The pipeline also watches for new coins that cross a discovery threshold — if an unknown token receives 3+ high/medium importance mentions from named institutions in tier-2 or better sources, it gets flagged for manual review and potential addition to the dashboard.
Conversely, coins with no relevant institutional news for 60 days and a score below 5 get added to a retirement watchlist. We don't auto-remove coins, but we flag them so the editorial team can evaluate whether they still belong in the institutional tracker.
What We Don't Track (Yet)
TokenSonar is focused exclusively on institutional adoption signals. We intentionally do not factor in price, market cap, trading volume, developer commit counts, or social media sentiment. These are retail signals, not institutional ones.
In future versions we plan to add on-chain transaction volume from institutional wallets, verified staking data from regulated entities, and direct feeds from regulatory filing databases.