The Acquisition Desk

The Problem

The constraint is never
on the product page.

Sotheby’s has taken Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC on designated lots — and the bidder guidance it published for those sales, in 2021, required payment from one of five named custodial wallets, so a self-hosted wallet was refused. TAG Heuer will take cryptocurrency straight from your hardware wallet, up to a ceiling of USD 10,000 that appears in its terms and nowhere near its products. Pavilions Hotels publishes a crypto page listing 28 accepted assets, then excludes two of its own properties from it. Five brands widely reported as accepting cryptocurrency in fact route the buyer through an OTC desk and are paid in currency.

None of that is discoverable from a marketing page. All of it comes from reading terms and conditions. That is what this desk does, and it is the only thing it does.

Read a real verification memorandum in full → — published unredacted except for the client, so you can see exactly what $450 buys before commissioning anything.

The Service

Three products.
Fixed fees, stated turnaround.

Acceptance Verification — $450, three business days

One vendor, one intended transaction. We establish in writing, against the vendor’s own published material and, where obtainable, direct confirmation:

• whether cryptocurrency is accepted, and for what — all stock, designated items only, or deposits
• which assets, and on which payment rail
• whether payment may come from a self-hosted wallet, or only from a named custodian
• the minimum and maximum spend, and whether the ceiling sits below your intended purchase
• identity requirements, and the threshold at which they trigger
• refund treatment, and at which exchange rate
• whether this is genuine acceptance, or OTC conversion presented as acceptance
• a source URL and a read date against every clause above

Delivered as a dated memorandum. Where something cannot be established at source, the memorandum says so. We do not infer.

Category Shortlist — $1,500, seven business days

You know the category, not the vendor. Up to five vendors verified to the standard above, compared on rail, self-custody, ceiling, identity threshold and settlement time — and a plain statement of which ones fail on your particular constraint.

Settlement Readiness Review — $2,500, ten business days

A specific planned purchase. Everything above for the chosen vendor, plus the settlement sequence in order: who holds what at each step, when title passes, which documents will be demanded and by whom, and where the transaction is most likely to stall.

Boundaries

What we do not do.

This matters more than what we do, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.

• We do not broker, negotiate, or act as agent for either side of a transaction.
• We do not hold, transmit, convert or take custody of funds or cryptocurrency at any point.
• We do not provide investment, tax or legal advice. Spending cryptocurrency is a disposal event in most jurisdictions; that is a matter for your own adviser.
• We accept no fee, commission or consideration from any vendor, and no vendor can pay for inclusion in The Vetted Index. You are the client. Nobody else is.
• We do not guarantee any vendor will transact with you. We report what they publish and what they tell us, dated, so that you decide.

Why Us

The record is the product.

We maintain The Vetted Index — 101 luxury brands across 15 categories, each carrying a source and a verification date — and we re-check it continuously against the companies’ own material rather than against older reporting. When an entry no longer holds we mark it unverified and say why; seventy-two of the ninety-nine currently do, alongside four we list as settlement routes rather than acceptors and one we cannot resolve either way. When we get something wrong we correct it in public and leave the correction visible.

That is an unusual way to run a publication. It is the only sensible way to run a verification desk.