TCHES's committee-based, multi-round peer-review process takes Bit2Watt outside the single-source cap's 'unrefereed primary' category, per the precedent set for Steck et al. 2024

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TCHES's own FAQ states its status directly: "It is a fully refereed journal, with its own ISSN," describing the mechanics as "double-blind review by three or more members of the editorial board," a board that "corresponds to the CHES conference program committee, which changes yearly and is composed of international experts who are independent from the editorial management of TCHES." CHES 2026's own Call for Papers describes the same pipeline from the conference side: "Submitted papers will undergo a journal-style review process, with accepted papers published by Ruhr University Bochum in an issue of the journal IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (TCHES)." The FAQ further documents a genuine iterative structure — outcomes of accept, minor revision (with an assigned shepherd), major revision, reject-and-resubmit, or reject — and TCHES's own submission-page timeline adds a defined rebuttal window before each decision (the Issue 4 round Bit2Watt went through ran "Rebuttal: 28-31 May 2026").

The vault has already ruled once on what this kind of confirmed committee review means for sources.md's single-source concentration cap: claim-steck-2024-www-short-paper-cleared-committee-peer-review found that WWW 2024's single-blind Short Papers track took a paper outside the cap's "unrefereed primary" definition, because the cap's own text names "a preprint, a working paper, a self-published report, a conference abstract" as the category it governs, and a paper that cleared a named committee's review is not in that category. TCHES's process here is at least as rigorous on the specific question that matters — was there a committee gate, not how selective it was: double-blind rather than single-blind, three-or-more reviewers rather than an unspecified number, multiple defined decision outcomes with revision rounds rather than a binary accept/reject. Applying the same logic, and given Bit2Watt's TCHES 2026 acceptance confirmed at IACR's own primary record: Bit2Watt (arXiv:2607.05993) is not an "unrefereed primary" as the cap's own text defines that category, and the cap's restriction on further Bit2Watt-sourced claim-notes (question-corroborate-bit2watt-single-source-cap) no longer binds on this source going forward.