Every peptide vendor has a COA. That is not the interesting question. The interesting question is whether the document they are showing you reflects a real test, run on the actual product you are buying, by a lab you can independently verify.
Usually the answer is no.
Most COAs are impossible to verify
A Certificate of Analysis is supposed to be a third-party document. An independent lab runs tests on your product and issues a report. The vendor did not write it, does not control it, and cannot quietly update it when results are inconvenient.
What most vendors actually provide is a PDF with a number on it. No lab contact information that checks out. No chromatogram. No way to look up the report on the lab's own servers. Anyone can open a Word document and type "Purity: 99.7%."
RAADFest, Las Vegas, July 2025
Contaminated products are a real and documented problem in this market. The vendors responsible all had COAs too.
What a real test panel looks like
Testing is not a single test. A serious vendor runs a full panel, and each test answers a different question. Here is what that panel should cover, and what we actually run before anything gets listed on this site.
Identity and purity: the baseline
LCMS (Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry) is the foundation. It separates every component in a sample and identifies each one by mass. This tells you two things simultaneously: that the compound is actually what it claims to be, and exactly how much of the vial content is that compound versus everything else. Without LCMS, you are guessing at both. A vial labeled BPC-157 with no LCMS confirmation could contain an entirely different peptide, and you would have no way to know.
What is actually in the powder
Purity percentage from HPLC or LCMS measures peptide purity relative to other organic compounds. It does not tell you how much of the total powder weight is actually peptide. Net peptide content testing answers that question instead . Peptide powders absorb water, carry salt residues from synthesis, and retain other non-peptide mass. In practice, 60-90% of a powder's total weight is actually peptide. The rest is not. Knowing this number matters if you are trying to work with precise amounts.
Then there is TFA. Trifluoroacetic acid is used in peptide manufacturing and gets trapped in the final product. It can account for 10 to 45 percent of total powder weight. That means in a worst case, nearly half of what you paid for is acid, not peptide. High TFA levels also disrupt cell membranes at concentrations you might reasonably encounter. A good vendor measures it. A lot do not.
pH is another test that is easy to run and often skipped entirely. The wrong pH degrades peptides in storage and, for injectable products, damages tissue. It takes two minutes to measure and tells you a lot about how carefully a product was prepared.
The injectable risk multiplier
For anything intended to be injected, the stakes change completely.
Endotoxins are debris from bacterial cell walls. They survive sterilization. A product can be completely sterile, with no living organisms present, and still be loaded with endotoxins that cause fever, immune reactions, or in serious cases, septic shock when injected. Sterility testing and endotoxin testing are not the same thing. Both are required.
Sterility testing itself is a 14-day culture test that confirms no living bacteria, fungi, or mold are present. It is slow, it costs money, and skipping it for an injectable product is genuinely reckless. Some vendors run it. Many do not.
Heavy metals testing covers arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury. These accumulate in the body over time. Injectable limits are ten times stricter than oral limits, and the only acceptable result for any of these is non-detect. Variance testing checks multiple vials from the same batch to confirm consistency. If they vary widely, your amount is a guessing game, not a controlled input.
On fentanyl screening
How to spot a fake COA
The single biggest red flag is the absence of a chromatogram. A chromatogram is the raw graph output from the instrument. It shows exactly what was detected and when. It is difficult to fabricate convincingly. A COA without one is a summary number with nothing underneath it.
Look for a verification key or QR code that links to the lab's own servers. Without this, you have no way to confirm the document has not been edited after the fact. Check whether the lab name actually appears when you search for it. We have seen COAs from vendors whose testing labs do not show up anywhere when you Google them. Look at the COA date. A certificate from two years ago being applied to a current batch tells you nothing about what is in that batch today.
And if every single result comes back at exactly 99.0% or 100.0% across every product, that is not a quality signal. Real tests show variation. Real labs report what they find.
How Validated Peptides tests
Every product we sell gets tested through Janoshik Analytical before it is listed. Not after. The test happens before the product goes on sale, and if it does not pass, it does not go on sale.
Janoshik issues every report with a unique verification key. Go to janoshik.com/verification, enter the key from any of our COAs, and you will see the original report directly on their servers. Not our copy of it. Theirs. You are not taking our word for anything.
We run the full panel: identity, purity, TFA content, endotoxins, sterility, heavy metals, fentanyl screening, variance across vials, pH, and raw chromatography data. Most vendors run two or three of these. We run all of them because the alternative, guessing that everything is fine, is not acceptable to us.
The peptide market is largely unregulated. That puts the burden on vendors to set their own standard. Ours is: every batch, full panel, independently verified, publicly available. "Tested" means nothing without verification. Ask for the key. Look it up.
Validated Peptides is named for a reason.