Editorial Standards

Stacksmith is a news site about the Solana ecosystem, written for the people building on it. This page explains who writes it, how articles get made, and what you can hold us to.

What Stacksmith covers

Stacksmith covers what changes for Solana builders. That means protocol and governance changes, developer tooling and APIs, DeFi and payments infrastructure, incidents and outages, and projects shutting down.

We do not cover SOL price action, ETF flows, treasury companies, or memecoin volume. Plenty of sites do that well. It is not what this one is for.

Who writes Stacksmith

Every article on Stacksmith is written and edited by Mike Hale, who is named on each piece and accountable for every claim in it.

Mike has 25 years of software development and enterprise technology experience. He is the Solana Technical Writer at Quicknode and Editor of the Colosseum Codex newsletter. You can find him at mikehale.me, on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn.

There is no anonymous editorial team here. If something on this site is wrong, there is one person to ask about it.

How our articles are produced

Stacksmith articles are AI-assisted and human-edited. A human reads, edits, and approves every article before it publishes, and no piece goes live unreviewed.

We use AI tools for research and drafting, the same way a newsroom uses any other tool. What that does not change is who is responsible for the result. Every published claim has been checked by a person, and the byline means what bylines have always meant.

The editing pass on every article checks the facts and figures against their sources, the accuracy of any code or technical detail, and the writing itself for the errors and filler that drafting tools produce. Anything that cannot be verified either gets cut or gets labeled as unverified in the article.

We publish roughly one article on a working day. We are not trying to win on volume, and we would rather run fewer pieces that are right.

How we source claims

Every factual claim in a Stacksmith article traces to a source you can check, linked at the point the claim is made.

A few rules we hold to:

• Numbers get sourced or labeled. Figures come from primary documentation, official announcements, on-chain data, or a named source. When we cannot confirm a number, we say it is unverified rather than presenting it as fact.
• We say where a claim came from. A company's own announcement is a fine source, and we identify it as one. There is a difference between something a project says about itself and something independently confirmed, and we do not blur it.
• We do not invent quotes, statistics, or links. Ever, for any reason.
• We separate reporting from opinion. The body of an article reports what happened. Where we reach a conclusion about what it means, it goes at the end and it is clearly ours.

Corrections

We correct errors in public, on the article, with a note saying what changed and when.

We do not quietly edit a published piece to fix a factual mistake. If a correction is significant enough to change the meaning of an article, the note says so plainly. Minor typo fixes do not get a note.

If you find an error, tell us. Corrections are the fastest way to make this site better and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.

How Stacksmith makes money

It doesn't. Stacksmith is unfunded and takes no revenue from advertising or sponsored posts.

Nobody has paid for coverage on this site, and there is no rate card, no sponsored slot, and no paid placement to buy. If that changes, this page changes first.

Articles may occasionally carry affiliate or referral links. Those links have no influence on what gets written. They do not determine which stories run, which projects get covered, or what an article concludes. No product has ever been covered here because it had a referral program, and none ever will be.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts of interest that would stop Stacksmith from covering any newsworthy item in the Solana ecosystem. Nothing is off the table.

Mike works in the Solana ecosystem, which is why he has anything useful to say about it. He is the Solana Technical Writer at Quicknode and Editor of the Colosseum Codex. Where an article covers a project he has a working relationship with, including those two, the relationship is disclosed in the article itself.

Disclosure is the mechanism here, not avoidance. A relationship gets named and the story still runs.

Last updated: September 1, 2026.