Publishing Verified Trader Performance — United States Regulatory Overview

How NakedPnL operates as a publisher of verified trader performance in the United States, with reference to the Investment Advisers Act, the CEA, and CCPA/CPRA.

NakedPnL publishes a registry of verified investment performance produced by individual traders who voluntarily connect read-only exchange API keys or sign on-chain wallet attestations. Each trader's daily portfolio value is captured by the platform, used to compute a time-weighted return (TWR), and recorded in an append-only, SHA-256 chained ledger. Daily Merkle roots are anchored to Bitcoin via the OpenTimestamps protocol so that any third party can independently re-verify the published data.

This page describes how that activity is positioned under United States federal and selected state law. It is written for users, prospective traders, journalists, and counsel who want to understand the regulatory framing the platform operates within.

How NakedPnL is classified in the United States

NakedPnL's published activity is the production and distribution of factual performance data. The platform calculates the time-weighted return of a connected account from raw exchange snapshots, signs each calculation with a content hash, and links those hashes into a chain that any reader can independently re-verify.

The platform does not advise any specific user on whether to invest, does not match capital with traders, does not place trades on anyone's behalf, and does not custody funds. Because each of those activities is what brings a firm under federal securities or commodities supervision, none of them are offered.

The Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and the publisher's exclusion

Section 202(a)(11) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (15 U.S.C. §80b-2(a)(11)) defines an investment adviser as any person who, for compensation, engages in the business of advising others as to the value of securities or the advisability of investing in, purchasing, or selling securities, or who issues analyses or reports concerning securities.

Subsection (D) — commonly called the publisher's exclusion — excludes from that definition the publisher of any bona fide newspaper, news magazine, or business or financial publication of general and regular circulation. The Supreme Court interpreted this exclusion in Lowe v. SEC, 472 U.S. 181 (1985), holding that publications offering impersonal advice to a general audience, untimed to specific market events, are protected from registration obligations.

Three Lowe factors are typically discussed: (i) the publication must be bona fide, in the sense of offering disinterested commentary rather than acting as a tout; (ii) it must be of general and regular circulation, not personalized; and (iii) it must not be timed to specific market events in a way that suggests a hot-tip service. NakedPnL's published data is impersonal — every reader of the registry sees the same TWR series for a given trader — and the daily snapshot cadence is dictated by NAV close, not by market events. The platform does not earn a commission tied to trade execution.

The publisher's exclusion is not self-executing. A determination that any given activity falls within it is fact-specific and ultimately a question for a court or the SEC's Division of Investment Management. NakedPnL's posture is to design the product so that the Lowe factors are robustly satisfied; it is not to claim the exclusion has been confirmed by the Commission.

The Commodity Exchange Act and the CFTC

Crypto-asset perpetual futures and similar derivatives traded on offshore venues sometimes fall within the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's jurisdiction under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA). A person who, for compensation, advises others as to the value or advisability of trading commodity interests can be a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) under §1a(12) of the CEA and §4m of the CEA's registration regime.

NakedPnL does not advise users on whether to trade any specific commodity interest, does not publish forward-looking views on price, and does not produce reports targeted at any user's circumstances. The platform publishes historical performance data of consenting traders. Where the §4m exemptions are available — for example, the limitation to providing advice to fewer than 15 persons in the prior 12 months and not holding out as a CTA — they would in any event be considered carefully.

As with the SEC analysis, NakedPnL's posture is conservative product design rather than reliance on a single statutory hook. The platform does not advertise or describe itself as a CTA, IB, FCM, or any other CFTC-registered category.

Broker-dealer, exchange, and money-transmitter analysis

Section 3(a)(4) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 defines a broker as any person engaged in the business of effecting transactions in securities for the account of others. NakedPnL does not effect any transactions on behalf of any user. Read-only API keys, by their nature, cannot place trades. Wallet attestations used for prediction-market venues are signature-based proofs, not order-routing authority.

Section 3(a)(1) of the same Act defines an exchange as any organization that brings together purchasers and sellers of securities. NakedPnL does not match buyers with sellers and does not maintain an order book.

Money-transmitter status under FinCEN guidance and state-level regimes (such as the New York Department of Financial Services BitLicense framework codified at 23 NYCRR Part 200) attaches to firms that accept and transmit value on behalf of customers. NakedPnL does not custody, accept, or transmit any user funds. Trader accounts remain entirely on the third-party exchange or wallet.

What NakedPnL does not do

Because regulatory classification depends on what a firm actually does, the design of the product is the substantive defence. The list below is enforced both by codebase architecture and by a CI test that fails the build if any of these features were re-enabled.

• No copy trading. The codebase flag ENABLE_COPY_TRADING is permanently false. The platform cannot replicate one user's trades into another user's account.
• No personalized recommendations. The codebase flag ENABLE_PERSONALIZED_RECOMMENDATIONS is permanently false. No user-specific suggestions are produced.
• No broker affiliate links. The codebase flag ENABLE_BROKER_AFFILIATE_LINKS is permanently false. The platform does not route users to brokers in exchange for fees.
• No investor-trader matching. The codebase flag ENABLE_INVESTOR_TRADER_MATCHING is permanently false. The platform does not pair capital with traders and does not arrange any deals.
• No custody. Read-only API keys cannot move funds. Wallet attestations are signatures, not transfer authority.
• No execution. The platform never sends orders to any venue.

What United States users should know

United States users should treat the registry as factual performance data and nothing more. Past performance does not predict future results. Trading strategies that produced strong historical TWR may not be replicable, may rely on market conditions that no longer obtain, and may carry risks that are not visible in a return series.

If a third party offers to manage your money on the basis of a NakedPnL-published track record, that third party — not NakedPnL — is the entity making the offer, and the user should evaluate whether that third party holds the registrations and disclosures required for the activity. NakedPnL does not vouch for any third-party manager.

California: CCPA and CPRA

California residents have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CCPA/CPRA, Cal. Civ. Code §1798.100 et seq.). Those rights include the right to know what personal information is collected, the right to delete, the right to correct, the right to opt out of sale or sharing, and the right to limit the use of sensitive personal information.

Traders who connect an account choose, through an explicit consent dialog, whether their handle and verified TWR series appears in the public registry. Withdrawing that consent removes the entry from the public-facing endpoints. A user can also delete their account in full, which removes their data from the platform other than what is retained as required by law or aggregated audit-trail requirements that do not identify the individual.

Tax considerations

NakedPnL is not a broker for U.S. federal income tax purposes within the meaning of Internal Revenue Code §6045 and the proposed broker reporting regulations. The platform does not effect transactions on behalf of users, does not custody assets, and does not have access to the gross proceeds or cost basis information for any trade. No 1099-B, 1099-DA, or similar information return is generated by NakedPnL.

Users remain responsible for their own tax reporting. The exchange or wallet that actually executed trades is the relevant source of trade-level data. A licensed tax professional in your jurisdiction is the right point of reference for any specific question.

United States disclaimer variant

The platform applies a jurisdiction-specific disclaimer at the surface of the user interface. United States users see the standard publisher disclaimer with no additional notice. The disclaimer variant key is us, configured in lib/jurisdictions.ts, and corresponds to a non-EU posture without an explicit cookie banner because no consent is required for the cookies the platform uses.

Frequently asked questions