Trust and safety
The honest question about any link exchange is whether it will eventually cost you. Here is the whole process, so you can judge it rather than take my word for it.
That person is me, Heidi. I look at whether the site is real and active, whether the niche actually fits the rest of the network, and I spot-check the metrics you report against my own Ahrefs and Moz access. You also have to publish a page at your own domain so I can confirm the site is yours. Nothing about this is automated.
A straight two-way swap is easy to identify: two sites linking to each other, often with matching anchors, often added the same week. Three-way chains break that. A links to B, B links to C, C links to A, so no site links back to whoever linked to it. There is also a delay window before the reciprocal link is due, so placements don't all appear at once.
Placed links are re-fetched on a schedule and checked for three things: that the link is still present, that it is still dofollow, and that the anchor still matches what was agreed. If any of those change, both members are notified. You can also trigger a check yourself at any time rather than waiting for the next scheduled one.
Completion rate and average link retention are calculated from real completed agreements and shown on every member's profile. A member who takes links and then quietly removes their own can't hide that from the next person considering a swap with them.
No one can guarantee how a search engine will treat any given link, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. What I can tell you is that the network is small, every member in it has been checked by hand, the exchanges are structured to avoid the obvious patterns, and nothing is left unmonitored after the fact.
If that isn't enough certainty for your situation, that is a completely reasonable conclusion to reach.
Every listing and every profile has a report action. Reports come to me, not to an algorithm, and I read all of them. Depending on what I find, the outcome is a warning, a suspension, or a ban.
Members who have been removed don't get quietly re-admitted under a second site.
Once you're verified you get an embeddable badge for your own site, so readers and other bloggers can see you've been checked.