Benchmark governance

The independent committee seat

The seven-part independence test, published before a candidate exists; the power to block rather than comment; and what the administrator may do while the seat is vacant.

Status: published 2026-08-20 as oracle build item O0.5. The seat is vacant. Applies to: the benchmark class (INDEX-SPEC §3.7) — WETGRI, WETFED, WETX, WETFRAG, and any benchmark added later. Slates are the tactical class and are not governed here.

This document is published BEFORE a candidate exists, on purpose. A standard written with a particular person in mind is a standard written to fit them. Publishing the test first means the appointment can be measured against it by anyone, including by the person appointed.

1 · Why the seat is not decoration

conflicts.md discloses the vacancy plainly, and today the administrator is the sole decision-maker on methodology changes. That is survivable for a benchmark quoted in an article. It stops being survivable the moment anything references the benchmark, because at that point every methodology decision has a beneficiary, and a governance structure in which one person decides and the same person benefits is not a structure — it is a promise.

The gap is disclosed rather than papered over, which is the right posture. It is not a substitute for closing it.

2 · The independence test

A candidate is independent only if all seven hold. They are cumulative: failing one fails the test, and a partial pass is not a qualified appointment with a caveat.

	Test	Why this one
1	No position in the constituents. No holding, direct or indirect, in any market that is a current or candidate constituent of any W.E.T. benchmark.	A committee member deciding a composition rule while holding one of the markets is deciding their own P&L.
2	No interest in any referencing product. No holding in, fee from, or economic exposure to any instrument, fund or contract that settles against or tracks a W.E.T. benchmark.	This is the one that binds hardest once T1 ships. A member with exposure to a referencing product has an interest in the number, not merely in a market.
3	No venue relationship. No employment, consultancy, equity, advisory seat or revenue share with Kalshi, Polymarket, Gemini or any venue W.E.T. indexes or may index.	Venue inclusion and weighting are committee decisions.
4	NO TOKEN ALLOCATION. No allocation, grant, vesting entitlement, discount, airdrop or option in any token issued by or associated with W.E.T. — now or under any future structure.	See §3.
5	No W.E.T. commercial interest. Not an employee, not an equity holder, not a revenue-share partner, and not a paying member of the circuit whose standing a methodology change could affect. A published, fixed, non-contingent fee for committee service is permitted and is disclosed.	A fee that varies with W.E.T.'s success is a stake in W.E.T.'s success.
6	A fixed term, with a published end date. Renewable once. Neither the administrator nor the member may end it early except for the disclosed causes in §5.	A seat held at the administrator's pleasure is advisory whatever it is called.
7	Willing to dissent in public. The member must accept in advance that dissents are published verbatim, unedited, alongside the decision.	§4.

Disclosure is annual and on change. The member files a statement against each of the seven at appointment, every twelve months, and within fourteen days of any change. The statements are published, not held on file. A conflict disclosed is manageable; a conflict discovered is not.

3 · Why rule 4 is stated separately

No token allocation, ever, in any form.

W.E.T. has no token today. ../research/wet-token/ explores whether there should be one, and ../oracle-spec/03-ROADMAP-T2-T3.md describes structures in which one would exist. Rule 4 is written now, while it costs nothing, for exactly that reason.

A token holder benefits when the benchmark is more widely referenced. A committee member exists to refuse methodology changes that make the benchmark more attractive at the cost of making it less true. Those two interests point in opposite directions, and putting them in one person destroys the seat's only function.

Written before the token exists, this is a constraint. Written afterwards, it is a negotiation.

4 · Powers — what the seat can actually do

The seat can BLOCK a methodology change. It is not an advisory role.

A committee that can only comment produces a governance page that reads well and changes nothing, and its existence is worse than its absence because it implies a check that is not there.

Concretely, the independent member:

may block any material methodology change under methodology-change.md. A block is final for that proposal in that consultation period. The administrator may re-propose after the window with a changed proposal; they may not override.
may compel a consultation on a change the administrator has classified as non-material — the disagreement itself being evidence the classification is contestable.
may require publication of a dissent, verbatim and unedited, alongside any decision they were outvoted on or declined to support. Dissents are published whether or not the administrator agrees with them, and are not summarised by the administrator.
must be consulted, with a minimum of five working days, before any restatement under restatement.md or any cessation under cessation.md.
may not direct a published value, select constituents, or participate in settlement. The seat is a check on the RULES, not a second hand on the number. A member who could move a value would need the same conflict wall the administrator has, and the wall is what makes them useful.

5 · Removal, resignation, and the honest failure mode

A member may be removed only for: a breach of the §2 tests; a failure to file a disclosure within thirty days of its due date; or an inability to serve. Removal is published with its reason, and the member's written response is published with it, unedited.

A member may resign at any time. A resignation is published with the member's stated reason, or with a note that they declined to give one — a resignation announced without a reason and without that note is indistinguishable from a removal, and the difference is exactly what a reader needs.

The failure mode this section exists to make visible: an administrator who cannot get a decision past an independent member has an incentive to find that member unsuitable. Publishing the reason, the response, and the timing next to the decision under dispute is the only real control on that, and it is cheaper than any procedure.

6 · While the seat is vacant — what the administrator may and may not do

This is the operative section today.

May:

run settlements, publish values, and publish refusals — all rules-based and already published;
open consultations, and publish their outcomes;
make non-material changes that touch no published value, disclosed in the usual way;
correct a factual error in a governance document, as a dated correction that leaves the original claim legible — the pattern used twice in conflicts.md.

May not, without disclosing that it was decided by one person:

adopt any material methodology change. Every such decision taken while the seat is empty carries the standing single-decision-maker disclosure, on the decision itself and not only on this page.

Must not, at all, while the seat is empty:

license a W.E.T. benchmark as a settlement reference. See settlement-reference.md. A benchmark that something settles against, governed by a single person who is also its commercial beneficiary, is the structure this entire document exists to prevent. The vacancy is a disclosed gap for a published number and a disqualification for a referenced one.
deploy the on-chain feed as anything other than a read-only publication. Publishing the number is not the problem; licensing it to settle against is.

7 · Appointment process

The administrator publishes the vacancy and this test.
Candidates file the §2 disclosure statements before any appointment is announced.
The appointment is published with: the statements, the fixed term and its end date, the fee (or its absence), and the administrator's reasoning.
The seat is announced as filled only once the statements are published. An appointment announced ahead of its disclosures is an appointment nobody can check.

Second seat. §3.7 requires at least one independent member. A second is worth having and is not required. Where two are appointed, a block by either stands: independence is not a majority mechanism, and a lone dissenter being outvoted by an administrator plus one is the structure this document is trying to avoid rebuilding.

8 · Status

The seat is vacant as of 2026-08-20. The test above is in force for whoever fills it, and §6 governs the administrator until then.

O0.5 is not closed by this document. It closes when the seat is filled and disclosed, or when the committee is formally re-scoped and that re-scoping is published. Publishing the standard is the part that can be done without a person; it is not a substitute for one.

The rest of the set

Methodology change & consultation

What counts as a material change, the 14-day consultation window, and why changes are prospective.

Data licence & rights

What the free tier grants, what attribution it requires, and what commercial use needs.

The loop architecture

The nine scheduled agents that cultivate indices, which one may publish, and the six mechanisms that assure accuracy.

The confirm gate

What human confirmation covers — merges only — and how to read the provisional and single-venue counts.

Restatement policy

The three narrow conditions under which a published value may be corrected — and the many under which it may not.

Cessation & fallback

What happens when a benchmark cannot be computed, and why the history stays published forever.

Conflicts & the conflict wall

The wall between index operations and the trading circuit, plus standing disclosures.

Data-error playbook

Detection, triage, quarantine — and the commitment to disclose errors nobody noticed.

Complaints & challenges

How to challenge a value, a rule, or a constituent. No account required.

Settlement-reference licensing

What licensing a benchmark to settle against requires — and why publication alone does not grant it. Reading a value is free; referencing it in something that settles is not the same act.

Determination, disruption & cessation

Written for contracts rather than charts: who determines a final value, the disruption fallback ladder, and why a refusal is not a cessation.

Incident process

Who is paged, what they do, and what gets published when the machinery fails — as distinct from a wrong value, which is the data-error playbook.

Finding — the WETX coverage breach, August 2026

Why WETX refused for five consecutive days, the change that caused it, and what is still not established. Published because an availability figure without the incidents behind it is a number nobody can check.