OTSFA Methodology — Data Sources & Version History

Live prices

Base and precious metals prices come directly from the exchange or association that publishes the settlement, not from resellers or news wires. Front-month futures act as intraday near-spot proxy alongside LBMA/LPPM fixes.

Regulatory reference prices

Statutory floors and royalty-base prices published by ministries and mineral commissions. Complete regime-by-regime deep-dive lives at /pricing-regimes/ — the table below is a directory of the primary gazettes.

Reserves & production

Country-level reserves and production figures come from the annual USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries — a single primary source refreshed once per year in late January / early February. Producer-level output comes from official company disclosures (annual reports, HKEX filings, SEC 10-K, ASX/JSE).

Warehouses

Warehouse stocks come from the exchange that runs the delivery network — nothing else. LME publishes daily approved-warehouse tonnages per metal and per location; COMEX/NYMEX publishes vault stocks; SHFE publishes bonded and non-bonded inventory. TSM Hub aggregates them but never smooths or interpolates.

Sanctions

Sanctions entries at /ecosystem/sanctions/ come from four primary lists — OFAC, EU consolidated, UK OFSI, UN consolidated. Refreshed daily via cron; TSM Hub does not designate, only consolidates. Metals-related keyword filter is applied to reduce noise but every original list is preserved for audit.

Regulators

Compliance-relevant regulator publications tracked at /compliance. Each source is scraped from the regulator's own RSS or press-release page — no news aggregators, no legal-tech summaries. Focus is tokenization, digital-asset, RWA, benchmark-administration and commodity-market disclosures.

Ecosystem members

The 42 ecosystem layers at /ecosystem/ (refiners, vaults, mints, PRAs, standards bodies, insurers, arbitration venues, forensic labs, NGO watchdogs, exchanges, custodians, ETFs, oracles, geological surveys, universities, conferences) each link out to the primary body's own website. A weekly HEAD-probe checks all ~536 external URLs; broken links appear in the freshness report and get flagged for review.

News

News on the Hub homepage comes from a fixed whitelist of primary business wires and industry outlets — Reuters, Bloomberg, Financial Times, S&P Global Commodity Insights, Mining.com, Fastmarkets, Kitco, Metal Bulletin. No secondary aggregators (cruxinvestor, discoveryalert, investingnews, techtimes) and no third-party press-release republishers. Substack blogs are allowed only when they are the primary source (e.g., a named analyst's own newsletter) with named authorship.

GMRI indices

TS-GMRI^™ is the in-house index family (19 members: main GMRI, precious, base, battery, critical, gold, silver, PGM, three cadence variants, plus placeholder slots for ETF and royalty wrappers). Every member's constituent price is sourced from Section 01 above — no smoothing, no interpolation, no proprietary black-box. Full methodology, formula, rebalance schedule and version history at www.truesourcemetals.com/gmri/methodology.

Tokenized metals

Tokenized-metal prices come from CoinGecko public API for market prices and directly from issuer proof-of-reserve pages for backing verification. Every listed token on TrueGlossary and How to Tokenize links to the issuer's own methodology page — not to a third-party listing site.

Version history

Every meaningful change to how data flows into TSM Hub is logged here — new source added, cadence adjusted, formula updated, primary-source URL migrated. Order is newest first.

• 2026-07-10
  HMA Indonesia bi-monthly auto-fetch activatedNEW SOURCE
  New cron 78bff548 fetches the Harga Mineral Acuan gazette from minerba.esdm.go.id on the 3rd and 17th of each month (buffer after 1st/15th publication). HPM Nickel Calculator now auto-populates the HMA reference dropdown. First live run: 17 July 2026 (Periode Kedua).
• 2026-07-10
  Package A citation cleanup — in progressCLEANUP
  Removing ~95 references to secondary aggregators (cruxinvestor.com, discoveryalert.com, investingnews.com, techtimes.com, low-authority substacks) across Hub and www. Every removed citation is replaced with a primary source (SEC filing, LME notice, USGS bulletin, company press release, or ministry gazette).
• 2026-07-04
  Discovery Watch daily monitor addedNEW MONITOR
  Cron 4fe0fa6b watches 14 tokenization/oracle X accounts (via nitter RSS), 5 GitHub oracle release feeds, CoinGecko tokenized-metals categories, and rwa.xyz/commodities every weekday morning. Latency from launch to detection reduced from 30-90 days to 4-24 hours.
• 2026-07-01
  Pricing regimes expanded 9 → 17EXPANSION
  Layer 2 added at /pricing-regimes/: Brazil CFEM, South Africa MPRRA, Peru Regalía, Ghana Royalty, Tanzania Royalty, Mongolia MRPAM, PNG Mining Royalty, Mexico SMD. All 17 regimes now have primary-gazette URLs, formulas and fiscal-instrument descriptions.
• 2026-06-25
  Sanctions parser rewrite (5 primary lists)PARSER
  Consolidated fetcher for OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated, EU consolidated, UK OFSI, UN consolidated. Metals-keyword filter, dedup by name+source, diff logging. Daily snapshot committed to /ecosystem/sanctions/.
• 2026-06-23
  GMRI dual-view + CF Benchmarks PAXG integrationGMRI
  Premium Tracker gained live-vs-live (vs CME front-month futures) and fix-vs-fix (vs LBMA / CF Benchmarks PAXG_RR) tabs. PAXG fix now sourced from the UK-BMR-registered CF Benchmarks index instead of a CoinGecko daily close approximation — regulated primary source replaces market-data proxy.
• 2026-06-17
  GMRI Methodology v1.0 → v1.1.1METHODOLOGY
  SHA-256 anchored (7ede98c4aa01ec7ad32ec7ebe3a62b306326631965a98732e5521325417cb1bd). Adds TS-GMRI-ETF and TS-GMRI-ROY placeholder slots to the family (activate when N≥3 distinct issuers with live tradeable tokens/equity). Full text at www.truesourcemetals.com/gmri/methodology.
• 2026-06-17
  security.txt (RFC 9116) expiry watchINFRA
  Weekly infra-vitals cron monitors /.well-known/security.txt Expires date, alerts if <60 days remain. Not a data source — data-integrity signal for external researchers who need a contact channel.
• 2026-06-05
  Ecosystem freshness watch (42 layers, 536 URLs)MONITOR
  Weekly HEAD-probe against every external URL in the 42-layer ecosystem directory. Broken/redirect URLs surface in the notification and get patched. Footer badge on each /ecosystem/*/ page shows "Verified YYYY-MM-DD".
• 2026-04-15
  KEPMEN ESDM 144/2026 effective — new HPM formulaFORMULA
  Indonesian Ministry of Energy & Mineral Resources issued the current formula for Harga Patokan Mineral: HPM = HMA × (%Ni − 1) × US$/t × corrective factor. Six nickel-content bands (1.5-1.9%). Supersedes KEPMEN 268/2025. HPM Nickel Calculator at /calculators/hpm-nickel-ore/ implements the current formula.
• 2026-04-01
  /pricing-regimes/ initial launch (9 regimes)LAUNCH
  Layer 1 batch: Indonesia HPM, India IBM ASP, Chile RIOMA, DRC ARECOMS, Philippines MGB, China Baotou RE, Zambia Norm Value, Kazakhstan MET, Australia RP bands. Each regime with primary ministry/authority URL and current gazette reference.
• 2026-01
  USGS MCS 2026 releasedANNUAL
  Country-level reserves and production data refreshed to USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. Data drives all 90+ metal deep-dive pages and the country reserves atlas. Next release watch: cron 24abf3e8 for MCS 2027 in January-February 2027.

Report source drift

If a primary-source URL on this page has moved, a value looks wrong, or a regime has been superseded by a new gazette, please tell us. TSM Hub is maintained by a small team and every correction is welcomed.