A ticker on Stellar is not an identity. Anyone can issue an asset called USDC, and several hundred accounts have. What makes an asset unique is the account that issued it — and almost nobody reads a 56-character address before trading.

Verification closes that gap. It links an asset to a domain its issuer controls, and marks the ones where the link holds.

#How the check works

1. The issuing account publishes a home domain on the ledger.
2. That domain publishes a stellar.toml naming the asset code and the exact issuing account.
3. LumosCore checks that the two references point at each other. If they do, the asset carries the mark.

Both directions are required. A home domain proves nothing on its own — anyone can set theirs to any domain, including yours. A stellar.toml proves nothing on its own either — anyone can write a file claiming any asset. Only the pair, agreeing, means anything.

#What the mark means

Identity, not quality. It says this asset is issued by the account that controls that domain. That is all it says.

It is not:

• a recommendation, or any opinion on whether the asset is a good investment;
• a guarantee of value, backing, redemption or solvency;
• an endorsement of the issuer, their conduct or their competence;
• a statement that the project will still exist next month.

A verified asset can lose all its value. Verification tells you that you are trading the thing you think you are trading — which is the specific problem a shared ticker creates, and the only problem this mark solves.

#Two ways an asset gets the mark

The handshake above is the first, and it is automatic and free. Publish the pair and the mark appears at the next read; nothing is submitted to us and nothing is paid.

The second is curation. An asset LumosCore lists has been checked by a person, and that check is what the mark records. This exists because some legitimate assets can never pass the handshake: BLND is the only BLND on Stellar, held by more than a hundred thousand accounts, and its issuing account sets no home domain at all — there is nothing to ask, and there never will be until the issuer changes it. Refusing those forever would make the rule useless.

The consequence, stated plainly because it is a real one: the mark means either the issuer vouched for the asset, or we did. Which of the two is recorded on every mark and shown when you hover it — a handshake landing on a third party's own domain and a tick LumosCore stands behind are both marks, and they are not the same claim.

#Getting your asset verified

1. Publish stellar.toml at /.well-known/stellar.toml on your domain, over HTTPS, readable cross-origin.
2. List your asset in it with the correct code and issuer.
3. Set the issuing account's home domain to that same domain.
4. Wait for the next read. Nothing needs submitting to us — the check is automatic, and results are cached for a period.

If the mark does not appear, the cause is almost always one of these: the file is not reachable from another origin, the domain redirects to a different host than the one on the account, or the issuer in the file does not exactly match the account that issued the asset.

#Verification and curation are not the same thing

They overlap without being interchangeable. Verification answers "is this asset who it says it is?", and the handshake answers it for free, automatically, whether or not we have ever looked at the asset. Curation is a paid, hand-reviewed decision to put an asset in the set we surface — a higher bar, applied to far fewer assets, and one that also carries the mark because the check behind it is a person.

So most verified assets are not curated. Every curated asset is marked. And neither is investment advice: a curated, verified asset can still lose all its value.

Last updated 29 August 2026