Methodology

A valid award is one that has been either successfully claimed by a recipient (from a pending invitation) or transferred directly between existing members. Reversed, expired, cancelled, admin-excluded and identified fraudulent events are excluded from every metric.

Redemptions of tokens with sponsors are tracked separately and never re-counted as new awards.

The Awarded ranking sums the tokens a member has sent as recognition over the selected period. Ties are broken first by number of awards, then by earliest achievement timestamp — a deterministic rule so the ordering never changes without new data.

The Received ranking sums tokens claimed or directly received by a member over the selected period, tied on distinct sender count, then earliest achievement.

Only members who have explicitly opted in on their Kindnessproof settings can appear on named leaderboards. Everyone else contributes anonymously to the overview aggregates.

• Opt-in only for named appearances. Members can toggle this at any time; leaderboards refresh from the current preference.
• Aliases supported. Members can choose to appear under an alias rather than their full display name.
• Self-declared location only. Country is never inferred from IP address. It is only shown when the member has explicitly ticked "show my country".
• Minimum cohort of 3 for country-level tiles on the overview, to avoid revealing the activity of a small identifiable group.
• No contact information — email, phone, exact monetary balance and private descriptions are never exposed on public pages, APIs or logs.

Sponsored campaign issuance is separated from organic kindness so that funded programmes cannot silently boost rankings. Related-account controls limit gaming through circular transfers. Administrators can exclude specific accounts from public rankings, with a mandatory reason recorded to an immutable audit log.

Every event is stamped with the methodology version in force at the time. If the rules change, past rankings remain explainable in their original terms. This is version 1.0.

The Global Kindness Index measures recorded acts of kindness on Kindnessproof. It is not a statistical inference about kindness in the wider world. It complements — rather than replaces — established wellbeing measures.