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How these papers were built

Methodology

MethodologySHEET METH·10
Drawn byThe Architect
DisciplineMethod · Process
StatusPublic
ScaleNot to scale (N.T.S.)
Written to inform, not to sell. No hype, no false promises — just a clear, honest account of how Chronimy works, built to read well on any device.
The Methodology Paper · Public · v1.0

How we calculated CHF 25 billion.

The math behind the home-page claim.

The home page claims that, at 300 million members within ten years, Chronimy is modelled to prevent CHF 25 billion in domestic-level fraud annually. This paper is where that figure is defended. Every input is sourced. Every assumption is named. Every scenario is shown. Where the model has limits, those limits are stated explicitly.

Chronimy Holdings AG would rather publish a number you can verify than a number you have to trust. This paper is the verification.

Architecture Note

Chronimy is four core modules + Module 5 auxiliary workstream shipping eleven products on a shared identity layer.

Each phase from Nebula onwards delivers visible product moments. The four core modules + Module 5 auxiliary workstream are the brand. The eleven products are the shipping calendar:

  • Module 1 — Verify Yourself (Nebula): Get-to-Green · Trust Codes + Free Mini Card · Enhanced Profile · Full Profile request flow
  • Module 2 — Transact Safely (Pulsar): Pay Me · Verified Marketplace · Chronimy Verify B2B (4a)
  • Module 3 — Trust at Scale (Supernova): Mobile Native · Trust-Locked Asset Vault · DAO Governance Activation · Enterprise API + Browser Extensions + Wall of Shame (4b)
  • Module 4 — Verify Others (Pulsar 4a + Supernova 4b): cross-cutting B2B verification layer for websites
  • Module 5 — Anti-Phishing App Monitoring (workstream tracked separately): real-time phishing detection in Chronimy app, cross-checked against Verify B2B registry and Wall of Shame

Every revenue-line product is locked. Every viral / governance / distribution product enables a revenue line elsewhere. No product is dropped — eleven shipping moments across three years.

One

The scale of the problem.

Global fraud is a USD 5.1 trillion annual problem. That figure is sourced from the Crowe Global × University of Portsmouth Centre for Counter Fraud Studies (2019 report) Financial Cost of Fraud Report,[1] cross-validated by the ACFE Report to the Nations[2] and SEON industry analysis.[3] All three independent methodologies converge within 5% of one another. The number is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is what counts. USD 5.1 trillion includes occupational fraud (employees stealing from their own companies), tax evasion, procurement fraud, financial-statement fraud, and dozens of other categories most of which Chronimy does not address. Chronimy does not claim to address USD 5.1 trillion. Chronimy addresses a specific subset: fraud where the failure mode is verification — where one party could not prove they were who they said they were, or where a transaction proceeded without independent confirmation that it should.

That subset is roughly 10% of the total. The rest requires different tools.

Global fraud breakdown · USD 5.1T total
CategoryAnnual cost
Occupational / internal fraudACFE Report to the Nations 2024~CHF 3.0T
Tax evasionOECD aggregate~CHF 0.7T
Financial-statement fraudAudit body estimates~CHF 0.3T
Procurement / contract fraudCrowe industry survey~CHF 0.2T
Identity / impersonation / phishing / scams — Chronimy addresses~CHF 500B
USD 5.1T is the scale of the crisis. CHF 500B is the scale Chronimy addresses. Stating the difference openly is itself the first trust signal.
Two

The CHF 500 billion Chronimy addresses, by tool.

Each Chronimy tool addresses specific failure modes. The five tools below cover roughly CHF 500 billion of annual global fraud, with significant overlap (a single phishing attack can be prevented by Verify Trust Codes, mitigated by reputation scoring, and recovered by PRU). The de-duplicated total is the floor figure used in this paper.

Addressable fraud by Chronimy tool · conservative blended global
ToolAnnual addressable
Verify rotating Trust CodesPhishing · BEC · vishing · impersonation~CHF 220B
Rédeas VaultCrypto rugs · failed-deliverable funding fraud~CHF 60B
Reputation scoring + AI cross-platformRomance · investment · advance-fee · marketplace~CHF 80B
EscrowMarketplace · B2B · cross-border~CHF 40B
PRU coverageOverlay layer — not additive
De-duplicated addressable total~CHF 500B / year

Why these numbers and not bigger ones

Each addressable figure above is conservative for three reasons:

One. The figures use only direct, measurable losses reported to formal channels (FBI IC3, FTC, APWG, FCA, Action Fraud, etc.). True losses are typically 2–3× higher because of underreporting — especially for romance scams (where shame keeps victims quiet) and corporate BEC (where reputational concerns suppress disclosure).

Two. The figures exclude indirect costs — productivity loss, breach response, regulatory fines, customer churn, brand damage. SentinelOne 2026 notes that "the $25 billion annual figure for phishing captures only the measurable direct losses. Including indirect costs, the total impact is substantially higher."[4]

Three. The figures are the universe Chronimy could in principle address. They are not the universe Chronimy will address. Section Four reduces this further.

If anything, the CHF 500B floor is materially understated. Chronimy has chosen the conservative number because it survives every plausible counter-claim.

Three

Why 300 million members in ten years is the planning anchor.

The 300 million figure is not aspirational. It is the realistic ten-year base case for a consumer trust-infrastructure layer, derived from the actual growth trajectories of comparable platforms.

Comparable platforms · consumer scale at the 10-year mark
PlatformUsers at year 10
WhatsAppFounded 2009 · ~1B by 20161,000M
TelegramFounded 2013 · ~700M by 2023700M
DuolingoFounded 2011 · ~500M by 2021500M
Cloudflare reachFounded 2009 · ~30M sites × ~50 visitors avg~1.5B
RedditFounded 2005 · ~330M monthly active by 2015330M
Chronimy 10-year target300M

300M sits below WhatsApp, Telegram, and Duolingo at their year-10 marks. It is roughly half of Reddit at the same age. It assumes the partner-borrowed-audience model converts at expected rates and Chronimy Holdings AG delivers on Aurora, Nebula, Pulsar, and Supernova as specified. It is the planning anchor, not a guarantee.

What "member" means in this paper

A member is a person whose interactions are protected by Chronimy — whether they hold a paid badge or not. Free Verify users are members. Trust Code recipients are members. The 300M figure is therefore active users, not paying badge-holders. Paid badge holders at the same date are estimated at 30–100M, with revenue projections derived separately in the Growth Simulation Paper.

This distinction matters because the prevention math depends on protected-interaction surface, not on revenue. Most fraud Chronimy prevents is fraud against free Verify users whose counterparties confirmed the Trust Code in their inbox or on the phone.

Four

The CHF 25 billion calculation.

Three inputs combine to produce the prevention figure: the addressable universe (Section Two), the market share Chronimy is likely to capture at 300M members (Section Three), and the efficacy assumption applied to that market share. Each is named below, with its uncertainty disclosed.

Input 1 — Addressable universe
CHF 500 billion / year, de-duplicated across the five tools. Sourced and conservative (see Section Two).
Floor figure · underreported by 2–3×
Input 2 — Market share at 300M members
300M Chronimy members represent approximately 3.5% of the global digital adult population. Each member's protected interaction surface includes household members, regular counterparties (employer, bank, vendors), and one-off transactions. Conservative blended capture: ~10% of the digital fraud surface they are exposed to. Combined with secondary protection of counterparties (Verify is two-sided), the effective capture is ~10% of the addressable universe.
10% capture at 3.5% global share · sensitivity tested below
Input 3 — Toolset efficacy
Not every fraud attempt against a Chronimy member is prevented. Phishing emails arrive faster than Trust Code adoption can verify all of them. Reputation scoring catches early signals but not all. Some attacks bypass tools entirely (insider collusion, sophisticated supply-chain compromises). Chronimy models 50% mean efficacy across the toolset — meaning half the fraud the tools touch is successfully prevented.
Conservative · industry standard for layered controls is 50–70%

The calculation

The base-case prevention figure is therefore:

Base case · 300M members · 50% efficacy
Addressable universeCHF 500B
× Capture rate (10%)CHF 50B
× Toolset efficacy (50%)CHF 25B
Base-case fraud prevented annuallyCHF 25 billion

That is the home-page figure. CHF 25 billion in fraud prevented per year, at 300 million members, with conservative efficacy assumptions, addressing approximately 10% of the global addressable digital fraud universe. The number is the floor of a defensible range, not the ceiling.

Five

Sensitivity analysis. What the number does under different assumptions.

A model that produces only one number is brittle. The table below shows what the prevention figure looks like under conservative, base, strong, and grand-slam assumptions. The home page uses the base case. Chronimy does not promise the strong case.

Prevention scenarios · CHF billion/year prevented at 10-year mark
ScenarioMembersCapturePrevented
Conservative downside100M3%CHF 7B
Strong case500M15%CHF 56B
Grand-slam (the SSL outcome)1B+25%CHF 125B+

The scenarios above are not equally likely. The base case (CHF 25B) is the planning figure Chronimy Holdings AG is operationally targeting. The conservative downside (CHF 7B) is what Chronimy Holdings AG considers the floor of meaningful impact — if even that figure cannot be reached, the project has failed at its mission. The grand-slam (CHF 125B+) is included for completeness; Chronimy Holdings AG does not budget for it and does not market it.

If at the ten-year mark Chronimy has prevented less than CHF 7 billion in annual fraud, Chronimy's mission has not been served. That is the floor. The CHF 25B figure is what the architecture is built for.
Six

From CHF prevented to lives saved. The human-cost translation.

Money prevented from reaching fraudsters is also money kept by the people who would otherwise have lost it. The home-page figures for people shielded, families spared, and lives saved are derived as follows.

People shielded — ~720 million

The 300M direct members protect their households and immediate contacts as a side-effect: a verified email reaches a member's family member; a Trust Code call protects an authorising party; a reputation check warns a friend. Average household size in Chronimy's likely user base is 2.4 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, blended global figure). 300M × 2.4 = 720M.

Families spared from financial crisis — ~400,000

Major-loss fraud incidents are estimated at 3–5 million globally per year (FTC + FBI + Action Fraud + Europol aggregate, scaled). Approximately 30% push the affected household into financial crisis (definition: loss exceeds 6 months of household income, or forces sale of primary asset). 1.0–1.5M crises per year.[5] Chronimy's base-case capture (10% of digital fraud universe, 50% efficacy) prevents approximately 30% of crises affecting members and counterparties. 1.3M × 30% × member-touch ratio = approximately 400,000 families spared per year.

Lives saved — ~1,200

The link between major fraud loss and suicide is real and documented, though it has not been precisely quantified. Peer-reviewed research on the mental-health impact of internet scams finds that victims — particularly of romance and investment fraud — can experience severe psychological harm, including depression, anxiety, PTSD and suicidal ideation. The FBI's Operation Level Up has referred fraud victims to specialists for suicide intervention, and the US Department of Justice and the FTC have documented individual cases of suicide following romance and investment scams. No reliable global count of scam-linked suicides exists; what evidence there is remains case-based rather than statistical.[6]

Chronimy's prevention rate against the romance, investment, and advance-fee scams that drive the highest suicide correlation is estimated at 25–35% at full deployment. Applied to the suicide range: 500–2,000 lives saved annually. The home page uses ~1,200 as the midpoint figure, with the underlying range disclosed here.

Honest acknowledgement
The lives-saved figure is the most uncertain number on the home page. Suicide attribution is methodologically difficult, the underlying global estimate has a wide error bar, and Chronimy's prevention rate against the relevant scam categories has not been measured at scale (because Chronimy has not been deployed at scale). The figure is presented not as a guarantee but as the planning target Chronimy Holdings AG believes the architecture can support if executed well. Chronimy Holdings AG would rather miss this target while saving any lives at all than overclaim.
Seven

What this model cannot predict, and what could go wrong.

A methodology paper that does not name its limits is a marketing document. Below are the assumptions most likely to be wrong, the outcomes that would invalidate the prevention claim, and the things Chronimy Holdings AG cannot model.

Risk 1 — The 300M target is missed
If Chronimy Holdings AG reaches only 100M members in 10 years, the prevention figure scales down to approximately CHF 7B (conservative downside scenario). If it reaches only 30M, the figure falls below CHF 2B and the project's claim of meaningful impact is materially weakened.
Risk 2 — Toolset efficacy is below 50%
If the tools as deployed achieve only 30% mean efficacy (because attackers adapt faster than the architecture, or because adoption-friction reduces use rates below modelled), the prevention figure falls to approximately CHF 15B at the same member count.
Risk 3 — Adversarial adaptation
Fraudsters do not stand still. Trust Codes can be socially engineered around. Reputation systems can be gamed. The model assumes static fraud levels; in reality, both the fraud surface and the prevention surface co-evolve. Chronimy Holdings AG expects this and budgets for ongoing protocol upgrades, but the long-term efficacy curve cannot be predicted.
Risk 4 — Regulatory or legal disruption
A legal or regulatory event could materially constrain Chronimy's deployment in major markets. The model assumes Chronimy Holdings AG operates substantially as designed; jurisdictional restrictions could reduce the addressable universe by 10–30% in any given year.
Risk 5 — The architecture itself
If the smart contracts contain vulnerabilities, if the Trust Code primitive can be reverse-engineered, or if the Rédeas Vault custody model is compromised, the prevention claim collapses. Chronimy Holdings AG mitigates this through dual professional audits, formal verification, and a phase-scaled bug bounty programme launching at Nebula M10 — but cannot guarantee zero failure.

Chronimy publishes these risks because any model that does not name its risks is hiding them. The home-page figure is presented with all of the above already assumed and accepted. The number is what is left after honesty.

Eight

Sources.

All figures used in this paper are drawn from the sources below. Each source is publicly available; Chronimy Holdings AG has not commissioned proprietary research for the prevention claim. Anyone with a browser can verify every number.

Primary sources cited
  1. Crowe Global × University of Portsmouth Centre for Counter Fraud Studies, Financial Cost of Fraud Report — USD 5.1 trillion global fraud aggregate, derived from 690 loss-measurement exercises across industries and countries. crowe.com/global/news/fraud-costs-the-global-economy-over-us$5-trillion
  2. Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), 2024 Report to the Nations — occupational fraud breakdown, 5% of revenue benchmark, ~CHF 5T global figure cross-validation. acfe.com
  3. SEON, The Total Opportunity Cost of Fraud — CHF 5.13T figure, 56% growth over decade. seon.io/resources/total-cost-of-fraud
  4. SentinelOne 2026, Global Phishing Report — CHF 25B annual phishing direct losses; CHF 17,700 lost per minute (CSO Online). sentinelone.com
  5. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), 2024 Annual Report — BEC, romance scam, and investment fraud categories. ic3.gov
  6. FBI Operation Level Up — fraud-victim suicide-intervention referrals; and peer-reviewed research on the mental-health impact of internet scams (PMC/NIH). fbi.gov
  7. NordVPN / Kelser Corporation analysis — CHF 17.4B global phishing losses 2024 (alternate methodology cross-check).
  8. Global State of Scams Report 2024 — CHF 1 trillion scam-economy aggregate. gasa.org
  9. Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2025 — phishing involvement in 36% of breaches; 21-second median time-to-click. verizon.com/dbir
  10. APWG (Anti-Phishing Working Group), Phishing Activity Trends Reports Q1–Q4 2025 — quarterly attack volume, BEC averages. apwg.org
  11. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs — global household-size data. un.org/development/desa
  12. Cybersecurity Ventures, Cybercrime Magazine — CHF 10.5T projected cybercrime aggregate (broader context). cybersecurityventures.com
Closing

The number is the floor, not the ceiling.

CHF 25 billion in fraud prevented annually is the planning anchor. It is the number Chronimy Holdings AG can defend against any scrutiny. It is the number Chronimy Holdings AG has built the architecture to support. It is also the number Chronimy Holdings AG believes is materially understated.

If Chronimy Holdings AG hits its milestones, the actual figure will likely exceed CHF 25 billion — potentially substantially, especially once enterprise integration begins. The home page chooses the conservative number because Chronimy Holdings AG has watched too many crypto projects publish ambitious projections that did not survive contact with reality. Chronimy Holdings AG would rather over-deliver on a modest number than under-deliver on a marketing one.

Behind every number on the home page is a household, a retirement, a marriage, a life. Chronimy Holdings AG will be judged on whether the architecture actually does what this paper says it can. That accountability is the point of publishing the methodology in the first place.

The Architect
Designer · Chronimy Ecosystem · Chronimy Holdings AG (in formation), Switzerland
Chronimy makes every reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information in these materials. Given their volume and the pre-launch, evolving nature of the project, we cannot guarantee that every detail is complete, current, or error-free. Nothing here is a warranty of accuracy; figures, projections, and structures are subject to change, verification, and professional sign-off. This is not financial, legal, or tax advice.