Data licence & rights

For this policy, W.E.T. means the benchmark service published by Jordan V Powell, a Virginia sole proprietor, under the unregistered World Event Trading brand. The brand is not a separate LLC or corporation. Jordan V Powell is the licensor for any rights this policy grants; indices@worldeventtrading.com is the public licensing contact.

What you may do with a published W.E.T. benchmark value. This covers the benchmark class only — WETGRI, WETFED, WETX, WETFRAG. Slates are the tactical class, are not served by the public API, and are not licensed here.

The public data exists to be quoted and checked. Nothing below is designed to make citing a number difficult; what it draws is the line between accessing or quoting the record and productising it.

The tiers

Product = rights + service commitments. Access to published benchmark data is not a product.

Planned means not purchasable. Institutional licence contracting, service-key delivery, and billing are not live. Anyone who wants to discuss future Pro or Enterprise rights should email indices@worldeventtrading.com; that contact creates no entitlement, and there is no licence checkout to point at.

The free tier, in full

1. Attribution is required. Every use of a value carries the attribution string served with it — see below.
2. Every published benchmark datum is available immediately. That includes same-day closes, every settlement row, every constituent list W.E.T. publishes, and the intraday indicative. No account, API key, D+1 embargo, or paid tier is required.
3. No commercial use — with the editorial carve-out below.
4. No redistribution. You may quote values; you may not re-serve the series as a feed, mirror it as an API, or ship it inside a dataset you distribute.
5. Constituent access is public. Published composition data is not a Pro entitlement. The same commercial-use and redistribution limits apply to it as to every other published benchmark datum.
6. Rate limit: 60 requests per 60 seconds per client IP, per endpoint. Enforced at the origin. Every response carries x-ratelimit-limit, -remaining, -reset (Unix seconds) and -policy; a 429 adds retry-after. All are exposed to browser clients via CORS — a quota you cannot read is one you discover by being blocked. Back off on retry-after, not on a guess.
7. No settlement reference. No tier below Enterprise permits settling a financial contract against a W.E.T. benchmark, and that permission requires a signed agreement plus governance review.

The editorial carve-out

Quoting a value in journalism, research, teaching or public commentary is always permitted with attribution, whether or not the publication is commercial. A licence that made a reporter ask permission before citing a number would defeat the purpose of publishing one. What the free licence reserves is the right to productise the record: embedding the series in a paid product, reselling it, or redistributing it as a feed requires a separate agreement. The data itself remains public.

Attribution format

Per the W.E.T. Geopolitical Risk Index (WETGRI), W.E.T. World Event Trading.

The exact string for each index is served as its attribution field, so it never has to be retyped from this page. In a chart or a table, the index name and W.E.T. in the source line is enough; in running prose, use the sentence above.

What the free tier withholds — and why

Nothing. Corrected 2026-08-20.

This section previously listed four withholdings — today's close, constituents, the intraday indicative, and WETFED's per-meeting sub-track. All four were false, and they were false against any unauthenticated caller with a browser:

• /api/indices/benchmarks/<slug> returns the entire ledger, with no delay rule applied, no authentication and access-control-allow-origin: *. That is today's close, the constituents carried on every row, and WETFED's meetings — three of the four, from one endpoint.
• /api/indices/benchmarks/<slug>/indicative computes and returns the indicative with no gate of any kind. That is the fourth.

A disclosure that overstates what is withheld is not a harmless error. It tells a prospective licensee they are buying access they already have. The correction is recorded here rather than quietly edited out, because a governance page that silently drops a false claim is asking to be trusted rather than checked.

And the correction runs in this direction on purpose. The document was wrong, not the system. Making the system start withholding would remove access people may already depend on — that is a product decision for the administrator, not a correction, and it would go through methodology-change.md if it touched anything the number depends on. The commitment to keep it this way, and its notice period, is in conflicts.md.

What this means for the tiers, said plainly: a paid licence is a rights and service product. It may carry support, a delivery-latency or availability guarantee, bulk capacity, redistribution rights, commercial-use rights, or settlement-reference status. A latency guarantee concerns the delivery service for the same public publication; it is not early access. No W.E.T. benchmark value is secret.

What we commit to

• The whole published history, from genesis through the newest row. There is no embargoed tail and never a recent-only window. The checksum chain starts at the first published value, so a window would leave a consumer unable to verify a single link and nothing to do but trust us. The free service carries no commercial rights or SLA; it is never weaker in data or auditability.
• v1 is stable. Fields are added, never removed or retyped. A breaking change mints v2 and leaves v1 serving.
• Absence is published. A day with insufficient data returns status: "insufficient_data" and a null value. No value is ever carried forward, interpolated, or back-filled to keep a series continuous.
• Corrections are visible, and labelled. A restated value follows restatement.md: the corrected value is appended as a new row and the original stays in the ledger flagged superseded: true. See "How a correction reaches you" below.

How a correction reaches you

This section exists because the earlier wording of it was wrong in a way a licensee could have built against. It said a restatement "breaks the checksum chain from the corrected date forward". It does not, and it must not: the corrective row chains off the superseded one, so a restated series still verifies end to end. Detecting a correction by watching for a broken chain would therefore have detected nothing.

What actually happens:

1. The corrected value is appended as a new row. Nothing is edited in place.
2. The original row stays in the ledger, flagged superseded: true.
3. The corrective row carries restates (the settlement date it corrects) and restatementReason (why the original was wrong), both published with the number.
4. The chain still verifies — through the superseded row. chainVerified stays true.

What that means for your code:

• A settlement date can carry more than one row. Key your cache on checksum, not on date.
• Never quote a row with superseded: true. It is the withdrawn value. latest already excludes them, and each response reports restatements[] and supersededDays so a correction is visible without diffing the series yourself.
• Do not filter superseded rows out before verifying. They are part of the chain; removing them produces a broken chain from correct data.
• If the newest published row is superseded and its correction has not been published yet, the response returns latest: null with latestUnavailableReason: "awaiting_restatement" rather than reaching back for an older value. A known-bad number and a stale number are both wrong; publishing neither is the honest answer.

The wrong value stays visible on purpose. A restatement you cannot see is indistinguishable from history quietly changing underneath you, which is the thing the ledger exists to make impossible.

Verifying a value yourself — no licence required

Every settlement row carries a checksum chained to its predecessor's, and the exact construction is published as checksumAlgorithm (one line) and checksumRecipe (field by field) on every history response, with the same content rendered at /developers. It is deliberately a short, dependency-free hash so it can be reimplemented in any language in a few lines.

What is verifiable, and what is not. The row checksum is fully reproducible from the fields served with it — that is the public API's core promise, and it holds for every published row. Every constituent list W.E.T. publishes is public. A separate historical limitation remains: a composition digest can cover a wider calculation universe than the retained constituent sample in an older ledger row. An early WETX close, for example, hashed 3,835 constituents while its inline field retained a 40-row sample. Current wide rows publish a full, checksum-verified compact archive through their compositionUrl; a pre-archive sampled row cannot be fully re-derived from that sample. No paid tier unlocks a hidden remainder today. The older gap is an auditability limit, not a Pro right and not a basis for selling access a caller does not receive.

Standing correction: the recipe published before 2026-08-03 described a single FNV-1a pass and could not reproduce any checksum we had ever published. It is now transcribed from the engine and has been re-derived, from the published text alone, against every published row. If a recomputation of yours still disagrees with a published checksum, that is a data error under data-errors.md and we want to hear about it — no licence, no account.

What a licence does not buy

• Not a forecast, not advice, and never a performance claim. A benchmark value describes what markets priced. It does not describe what will happen, what anyone should do, or what anyone earned. Where an accuracy scorecard is published it reports calibration, never returns.
• No guarantee of continuity. A benchmark may be suspended or ceased under cessation.md. The published history stays published regardless.
• An availability target, not an SLA — and the measured number beside it. See below.
• No exclusivity, and no endorsement. Using a value does not make anyone a partner, and W.E.T. does not operate any venue it indexes (conflicts.md).

Availability — what is promised, and what actually happened

Added 2026-08-20. "No guarantee of continuity" is honest for a documentation feed and insufficient for anything that marks against a value, which is the first question a licensee asks.

What is published, rather than promised:

And the measurement, which is the part that matters. Over the fourteen closes from 2026-08-06 to 2026-08-19, on a series re-inceptioned 2026-08-06:

A measured 64.3% stated plainly is worth more than a 99.9% promised. A refusal is the methodology working — the coverage floor declining to print a number computed off an incomplete weight basis — but it is still a day on which nothing was published, and anyone deciding whether to reference a W.E.T. benchmark needs that number rather than an aspiration.

This target is revisited once a headroom record has held for a quarter. It becomes an SLA only where one is licensed, under settlement-reference.md, and not before.

The on-chain feed

Specified, not deployed. Recorded here so the licence describes it before it exists rather than after.

The feed publishes benchmark values as signed, machine-readable records on-chain. It is free, unauthenticated and permissionless to read — matching the public indicative — and attribution is required wherever a value is displayed. Productising or redistributing the series remains subject to the commercial rights above; a licence changes those rights, not access to the signed value.

A day the index refuses is published exactly as a day it prints, signed identically, carrying its refusal class and rule and no numeric value at all. A consumer that cannot distinguish "the index refused" from "the publisher is down" will mis-settle, because those require opposite responses.

An on-chain value is not a settlement reference unless licensed as one. Reading is free. Referencing the feed in something that settles against it requires a licence under settlement-reference.md — which is what carries the determination procedure, the disruption fallback, the restatement entitlement and the cessation notice. Without one, a contract referencing this feed has none of those and no counterparty here. That is not a sales position; on-chain settlement is irreversible in a way a chart is not.

Changing these terms

Licence terms change the same way rules do: published first, prospective after. A material change to public benchmark-data access — a shorter history, a new delay, or authentication — is published 90 days before it takes effect under conflicts.md rule 6. Adding a right takes effect immediately, because nobody has to re-plan around getting more.

Standing disclosure: this document has not had external legal review. It is the operating policy of the administrator, written to be honest about what is and is not permitted, and it will be reviewed before any paid tier is sold. That gap is recorded here rather than left for a licensee to discover.

Questions, and challenges

Licensing: indices@worldeventtrading.com.

To challenge a value, a rule, or a constituent — no account or licence required — see complaints.md. Nothing in this licence conditions the right to challenge a published number on paying for it.