Trust and Method - how Stellar Scout reaches a verdict
Stellar Scout is an educational safety checker for Stellar (XLM) and multi-chain tokens. It is not financial advice, it is not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell anything, and it does not predict price or return. It answers one narrow question: what do the public on-chain records say about this asset, and which of those facts are the ones scammers usually cannot fake.
Who runs it
Stellar Scout is built and operated by DarkHorse Automations, an independent one-person automation studio. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for the Stellar Development Foundation, any issuer, any exchange, or any token project it scores. Nobody pays to be listed and nobody can pay to change a score.
How the verdict is computed
Every score is derived at scan time from public data. Nothing is hand-graded and nothing is stored as a permanent reputation. The signals that move a verdict are:
- Issuer configuration. Whether the issuing account has locked its master key, whether it can still mint supply, and whether auth flags let the issuer freeze or claw back your balance.
- Home domain and the stellar.toml. Whether the issuer publishes a domain, whether that domain actually resolves, and whether the TOML it serves claims the same issuer back. A missing or non-reciprocal domain is one of the strongest cheap signals there is.
- Holder and trustline distribution. How many accounts actually hold the asset, and how concentrated the supply is in the top accounts.
- Real trading history. Whether there are genuine payments and DEX trades over time, or a short burst of wash-shaped activity.
- Liquidity. Whether pools exist, how deep they are, and whether they can be withdrawn.
- Code-name impersonation. How many separate issuers use the same asset code - the single most common way people are tricked into the wrong token. See the Impersonation Index.
What a score is not
A high score is not a safety guarantee and a low score is not an accusation of fraud. A brand-new legitimate project and a fresh scam look nearly identical on-chain on day one; that is a real limit of the data, not a flaw we can engineer away. Treat the score as a checklist of questions to ask, never as permission to spend money.
What we cannot see
We read public ledger data. We cannot see who controls an account in the real world, what a team intends, off-chain agreements, custody arrangements, or anything on a private system. An issuer can pass every mechanical check and still take your money.
Data sources
Horizon (the public Stellar API), stellar.expert, and the issuer home domain and its stellar.toml, read live at scan time. Where a third-party source disagrees with the ledger, the ledger wins.
Corrections
If you issue an asset and believe a factual input is wrong - a home domain that has since been published, a key that has since been locked - re-run the scan first, because every scan is computed fresh and will pick the change up. If it is still wrong after a re-scan, tell us which specific field is wrong and we will look at it. We do not remove or raise scores on request.