kappi vs Kinfo: If Verification Is Free, Why Pay for It?

	kappi	Kinfo
Price	$15/month ($12.75 via a referral link)	Free · PRO $24.90/mo
How verification works	Sealed commit, publicly anchored	Broker account link
Certifies results are real	Outcomes are priced from market data	Yes, that is its purpose
Where the proof lives	Anchored publicly to Hedera	Their platform
How the trade is written	Shorthand, in the chatroom or journal you already use	Nothing to write — the broker statement is the input
US stocks & options	Both, plus crypto and forex	Both — most US brokers link
When the trade lands	The moment you commit it	Next morning — the sync is a nightly batch
Timed release you control	Sealed at commit, opens on its time-lock — or unsealed early, per trade or per recap	None — what synced is simply published
Works without broker access	Yes	No
Cost of minting many accounts	$15/month each	$0

What does a broker link prove?

Something real, and worth having: that the equity curve you are showing came out of an account that actually traded. That rules out the single commonest fabrication — a curve drawn in a spreadsheet — and Kinfo does it for nothing.^[1]

Reading the broker's own fills is the strongest way to establish that, and it is the half kappi does not do at all. What follows is not a list of things wrong with Kinfo — it is the four places the two products are actually built differently.

What does free change?

Who shows up. A free verified badge costs nothing to create a hundred times, so the badge itself carries no information about the holder — only the numbers under it do, and those can be selected. Open a dozen accounts, trade them differently, and eleven get abandoned while one gets a link in a bio. Nothing in that is against the rules and nothing in the verification catches it.

Charging $15 a month does not make anyone honest. It makes a farm of disposable identities cost real money, and it means the person behind the record has something to lose.

Kinfo's own paid tiers point at the same seam from the other side: PRO is $24.90 a month and PRO+ is $44.90, and PRO+ lists "Hide Trades" among what the money buys.^[2] Without that feature, your trades not only have no time-seal, but also have exact details read and published. kappi has no per-trade hide — a profile is public or private as a whole — which is the property that makes a handle worth handing over before the trades exist, and does not unseal until a time of your choosing.

Where does the proof live?

A record held inside a platform belongs to that platform: it is shown on their terms, and it does not travel if the account closes or the company does. kappi anchors the Merkle root publicly, so the proof outlives kappi — anyone can verify the log without kappi's cooperation, and the record stays yours.

Every sealed commit is hashed into a Merkle tree and anchored to Hedera, so the log is append-only and independently checkable.

A broker-linked profile is checkable while the company hosting it is around to answer for it. An anchored Merkle root is checkable by a stranger with no account, no cooperation from kappi, and nothing to lose if kappi stops existing.

How fresh is the record?

A day behind, by design. Kinfo's sync is a nightly batch: it runs at night Eastern time and captures the previous day's trades, with PRO accounts done by 6-7am and free accounts usually between 9 and noon.^[2]

What synced is simply published. kappi seals at commit and opens on the time-lock, and the trader can unseal early — a single trade, or the records behind one recap — which is a different power from choosing what to sync in the first place.

How does the trade get written down?

In a line, wherever you already talk. Trades are committed from a Chrome extension before the fact, not written up afterwards. A commit is shorthand — a symbol, a direction, a price — typed in the chatroom or journal you were using anyway, and the extension reads it there rather than asking you to fill in a form. Kinfo has nothing to type: the broker statement is the input, which is exactly why it needs the broker and kappi does not.

Do you need a broker account for kappi?

No. kappi is broker-agnostic. Commits are made from the Chrome extension, so any brokerage works — or your own journal, kept wherever you already keep it. No import, no account linking, no requirement to trade inside someone else's platform.

When should you pick Kinfo?

When what you need to establish is that your results are genuine, you would like to use a supported broker, you are not very concerned about privacy or security and you would rather not pay. It is free, it requires no card, and for demonstrating a real equity curve it does the job kappi does not do.

When should you pick kappi?

When you want the record anchored somewhere that outlives the vendor, released on your own clock rather than the sync's, and written in shorthand from the chat you already trade in or mirrored from your brokerage UI — and when you would rather the identity behind it cost money than be free to mint. $15 a month, $12.75 through a referral link, and no free tier.