Registration & approval

Registering with OnlyTons is free and open. Publishing to the market is not: every organization is reviewed by the broker before it can offer or ask for anything. This page explains what happens between those two points.

Why there is a gate at all

OnlyTons is not a directory you list yourself in. It is a market where the broker coordinates every deal and where operators never see each other's identity (Operator privacy). Both of those only work if the broker knows who is actually on the platform.

So the two halves are separated:

• Getting an account is free and instant. You can register, describe your business, and look around.
• Acting on the market needs approval. Posting supply, posting demand, being matched, and being party to a deal all wait for the broker.

This also happens to be the platform's real defence against abuse. Anything a spammer registers is invisible to every other operator until a person has looked at it.

The five steps

After you confirm your email you are taken straight to the setup form. It has five steps and everything saves as you go — you can close the tab and come back to where you left off.

1. Company. Your organization's name, country and region, plus the details the broker needs to verify that you are a real business: VAT number, company registry number, a contact email and phone, and optionally a website.
2. What you do. One or more of: farm/primary production, processing, buying/importing, trading, or advisory. This decides what you are able to publish once approved — see Roles & permissions.
3. Products. Which commodities you handle and on which side — buying, selling, or both. You can add a typical annual quantity, a season, and whether you deal only in organic. At least one product is required, because it is what lets the portal route relevant requests to you.
4. Certifications. Optional. You can be approved without any: a conventional producer is a perfectly ordinary operator here. Certifications affect whether a listing can be marked organic, not whether you are allowed on the platform. See Certifications & verification.
5. Review & submit. A summary, a list of anything still missing, and the button that hands your application to the broker.

If a product you handle is not in the catalog, use "Ask the broker to add it" on step 3. The catalog is curated on purpose — one shared vocabulary is what makes matching work — so new entries come through the broker rather than being typed in.

What happens after you submit

The broker sees your application in their registration queue and decides.

• Approved. You can publish supply and demand, be matched, and take part in deals.
• Declined. You are told why. You can edit your profile and submit it again — a decline is meant to be actionable, not final.

While you are waiting, you can already browse the catalog: commodities, availability windows, and what the market is asking for. Everything you see there is anonymised in the usual way.

What each state lets you do

That last row is deliberate and worth stating plainly: a suspension never strands a live contract. If your organization is suspended while a deal is in progress, you keep full access to that deal — you can read the thread, message the portal, upload documents, and take your own listings down. What stops is new market activity: you disappear from search and matching, and you cannot be added to a new deal.

Suspension

The broker can suspend an organization, and must give a reason, which you are shown. A suspension is reversible — the broker can reinstate you.

Not yet decided. There is currently no automatic rule about what earns a suspension. In particular, repeatedly trying to share direct contact details through the messaging relay is recorded and visible to the broker, but no number of attempts triggers anything by itself. The policy is an open question — see the register in llm-text/open-questions.md, item A6.

Your company details are never shown to another operator

Step 1 asks for a VAT number, a company registry number, and a phone number. Those are used by the broker to verify your business, and by nothing else.

They are treated the same way as certificate numbers: a VAT number is a lookup key into a public business register, so publishing it to a counterparty would be equivalent to publishing your company name. Neither those, nor your contact details, nor your website, nor your free-text description ever appear on any screen another operator can reach.

What a counterparty does see about you is a handle (OP-…), a coarsened area, your market roles, and your verification state. See Operator privacy.

One narrow exception, in your favour: your own organization's details are always visible to you, and a decline reason is shown to the organization it was written about. Nobody else sees either.

For the broker

The registration queue is under Registrations in the sidebar. Each application shows the company details, how many products and certifications it declared, and — where relevant — how many of that operator's messages have been declined for trying to share contact details. That last number is context for a suspension decision, not a trigger for one.

Approving is one click. Declining or suspending requires a reason, because the operator is shown it and is expected to act on it.

Organizations the broker creates directly are approved immediately: setting one up is the review.