Methodology
Scoring version hbm-v4. Every rule below is deterministic: the same evidence always produces the same result.
What counts as building
Dawnscan records a ShipEvent when a project does something concrete: a release, a deployment, an integration, an SDK, documentation, or — for meme projects — a game, tool, bot, art drop or community event. Creative and community output is real output. A meme is never required to pretend it ships software.
Announcements, hype, giveaways and marketing posts are recorded but never counted as building. An event also has to be backed by a public source or better before it can affect a project's status, so a project cannot talk its way into looking active.
Activity status
- Shipping
- A meaningful, source-backed update in the last 7 days.
- Active
- A meaningful update in the last 30 days, or at least 2 in the last 45.
- Quiet
- No meaningful updates for 30–60 days.
- Dormant
- No meaningful updates observed for over 60 days. This is not the same as abandoned — Dawnscan reports what it can observe, nothing more.
- Resumed building
- Shipping again after a gap of 60 days or more.
- Activity unknown
- Dawnscan does not yet track enough public sources for this project to judge.
Activity is never derived from token price, market cap, trading volume, holders or wallets.
Dawnscan Build Momentum
A 0–100 measure of how consistently a project ships meaningful work, combining:
- 35% shipping recency
- 25% shipping consistency
- 20% shipping significance
- 15% verification quality
- 5% source diversity
Bigger deliverables carry more weight — a product launch counts 10 where a documentation update counts 3, and an announcement counts 0. Repeated updates of the same kind have diminishing returns, and aggregated commit activity is capped, so neither commit volume nor marketing volume can inflate the score.
Discovery Gap and Still Building
Discovery Gap compares how actively a project ships against its current market footprint. A project appears Under the Radar when it is active, has Build Momentum of at least 45, and has at least 2 source-backed updates in the last 30 days.
Still Building is shown when a project's market value is at or below 50% of the high Dawnscan itself observed in the last 90 days, and meaningful building continued after that decline began.
These are factual observations about past activity and market context. They are not predictions, not valuations, and not investment advice. Dawnscan never claims that continued building will affect a token's price.
Evidence
Every update keeps its source. Dawnscan distinguishes what a project claims from what can be checked: self reported means a builder told us, source linked means it came from a source registered to that project, and source verified means Dawnscan confirmed it against a public source such as a GitHub release. Disputed and retracted updates keep their record but stop counting.
Reading Dawnscan as data
Everything on these pages is also readable as JSON, with no key and no account: /api/projects for the catalogue, /api/projects/{slug} for one project, and /api/ships for what shipped. The same filters as the browse pages, the same counts, and every fact carries the source behind it. Anything Dawnscan does not know is left out rather than sent as a zero. For a reader rather than a script, the same material is published as RSS.
What Dawnscan does not do
Dawnscan does not track wallets or holders, and stores no wallet, holder, PnL or smart-money data of any kind. It does not rank by price, and organic placement cannot be bought.