Terms of service

Acceptance

By using this service you agree to these terms. If you are using it for an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind that organisation. If you do not accept these terms, do not use the service.

What the service does

FORCE screens a crypto-asset address against public sources and returns a risk indication, the counterparties it could resolve, and a record of which sources answered. It is a research service produced under a Horizon Europe grant, offered so that firms and individuals can test what an open, auditable screening tool can do.

• Checks an address against published sanctions and designation lists, and against the interim MiCA register maintained by ESMA.
• Resolves recent counterparties from public chain indexers and attributes them where the attribution is itself public.
• Produces a report, and a PDF of that report where the holder of the address has signed for it.
• Records, for every figure, which source produced it and when it was retrieved.

Who may use it

The service is open to obliged entities, their advisers, researchers, and members of the public checking an address they hold or are about to transact with. You must be legally capable of entering into these terms in your own jurisdiction. Use is at your own initiative; the consortium does not solicit business in any member state.

Wallet signatures are not an account

Connecting a wallet produces a signature that proves control of an address at a moment in time. It creates no account, holds no key, moves no funds and grants no standing authorisation. The signature is used to bind a report to the address it describes, and for nothing else. Never sign a message you have not read, here or anywhere.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Present a result as a determination by a competent authority, or as evidence that an offence has or has not occurred.
• Use the service to harass, defame or expose an individual, or to publish a screening result about a person alongside their identity.
• Automate access beyond the published rate limits, circumvent them, or resell access to the service as your own product.
• Attempt to de-anonymise the operators of an address beyond what the public sources themselves state.
• Use the service where doing so would itself breach sanctions, export controls or the law applicable to you.

The limits of a result

A result describes what public sources said at the moment of the check, at the depth the service indexes, and no further. Attribution is partial by construction: an unattributed counterparty is one nobody has published an attribution for, not one that is known to be clean. A low score is the absence of found exposure, not a finding of innocence.

Where a report is marked degraded, at least one source could not be reached and the result is incomplete. Do not rely on a degraded report as the sole basis for a decision. Sources are published on their own schedules and an address can be designated, delisted or re-attributed between one check and the next.

Your obligations remain yours

Obligations under Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, Regulation (EU) 2023/1113 and the national law implementing them fall on the regulated firm, not on FORCE. Running a check here does not discharge a customer due diligence, monitoring, reporting or record-keeping duty, and the consortium is not your compliance function. Where the AML package requires records to be kept for five years, keeping them is your responsibility: retain the report yourself rather than assuming it can be retrieved here.

Availability

The service is provided as it stands and as it is available. It is funded research, it depends on upstream sources outside the consortium’s control, and it may be changed, rate-limited, interrupted or withdrawn at any time. No service level is offered and none should be inferred. The grant that funds this work runs to 30 September 2029; nothing here commits the consortium to operate the service beyond it.

Intellectual property and your data

The consortium’s own text, layout and graphics may be reused provided the source is acknowledged and the meaning is not altered. That permission does not extend to the European emblem, to third-party logos, or to material under its own licence. Data reproduced from ESMA, the European Commission, the US Treasury and other publishers remains subject to their terms. Addresses you submit are yours; the report produced about an address is yours to use, keep and hand to a supervisor.

Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the consortium and its partner organisations are not liable for loss arising from use of, or reliance on, the service — including a decision to transact or refuse to transact, a missed designation, or an incorrect attribution. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Mandatory rights available to consumers under the law of their country of residence are unaffected.

Suspension

Access may be rate-limited, suspended or refused where use breaches these terms, threatens the availability of the service for others, or exhausts the shared quotas of an upstream source. Where the reason is technical rather than deliberate, access is restored once the cause is resolved.

Applicable law

These terms are governed by the law of the member state in which the coordinating entity is established, and that member state is to be named here alongside the particulars in the legal notice before publication. Mandatory consumer protection rights available to you under the law of your own country of residence are unaffected.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the service develops. Material changes will be announced on this page before they take effect, and the version line above is updated when they do. The version in force is the one published here.

Questions about these terms go to the coordinator through the contact form.