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Dated risk reports on every protocol we track: verdict, 7-dimension scorecard, worst case, data appendix. Refreshed monthly. Not financial advice; DYOR.
50 reports9 solid · 33 caution · 8 avoidlatest 2026-08-06
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| Protocol | Verdict | Category | Researched | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Curve LlamaLend | avoid | Lending | 2026-08-06 | Curve is winding V1 down: no new V1 markets, a deprecation sweep in mid-2026 and a DAO risk-team mandate that names "the sunset of V1", while lenders in the CRV market have been unable to withdraw in full since October 2025 and a market oracle was exploited in March 2026. |
| Aave | caution | Lending | 2026-08-05 | Deepest audit registry in lending (re-verified through v3.6) and a core that has never been directly exploited, but 2026 produced two separate fund-loss events, not one: a March CAPO oracle misconfiguration that wrongly liquidated ~34 accounts for $21.7M to $27M, and April's rsETH bridge exploit that left about $92M of bad debt on the WETH reserve, repaired by an external ~$300M coalition and a court order rather than Aave's own backstop. In between, Aave lost its entire V3 bench: BGD Labs, Chaos Labs and the Aave Chan Initiative all exited amid what reporting calls a protracted governance power struggle. A ~$71M creditor claim over the recovered ETH still looks undecided, and this month's ~19% TVL rise mostly tracks ETH's ~19% price move rather than returning deposits. Caution holds, with Oracle and Admin control downgraded to yellow. |
| Apyx | avoid | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-05 | apxUSD has recovered to $0.9177 because STRC rallied 24%, not because anything was repaired: attested collateral is still 92.24%, there is still no atomic redemption, and the dollar-side exit behind a float DeFiLlama marks near $298M is about $1.96M of USDC across every apxUSD/USDC pool plus roughly $253K of Kraken bids whose best bid is $0.83. STRC concentration did not grow, contrary to the draft: it is flat at about 84% of asset reserves and down from roughly 74% to 70% on the wider base. |
| Cap | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-05 | Both standing unknowns are now closed on-chain, and the answers split. Upgrades are genuinely timelocked (24h, single admin, verified by enumeration), but the 3-of-5 developer Safe can whitelist a borrowing operator and set its LTV instantly with no delay, which is the parameter that actually governs loss. July added a reneged airdrop, unresolved founder self-dealing allegations, a 32% redemption run, and roughly eleven days of sub-par cUSD quotes. |
| Curvance | caution | Lending | 2026-08-05 | Genuinely strong audit coverage and non-upgradeable core contracts, undercut by three verified problems: an Emergency Council that can skip the 5-day timelock and can replace the timelock outright, a dual-feed oracle circuit breaker that is switched off across roughly $93M of the $97M book, and a record that is not clean, because about $868k of real WBTC was already borrowed out of Curvance against fraudulently minted collateral in May 2026. |
| Curve | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-05 | Deep, battle-tested stableswap AMM at $1.277B TVL, but crvUSD's backing has drifted away from user collateral: about 17% of circulating supply is over-collateralized LLAMMA debt and another 15% is PegKeeper-minted, leaving roughly two thirds traceable mostly to DAO-authorized minting, decided by a veCRV electorate in which Convex alone holds a reported majority and which lost its independent risk manager in July 2026. |
| Ethena | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-05 | USDe gave back about 13% of TVL and $564M of supply this month to ordinary carry contraction rather than distress, holding its peg through the whole window, but sUSDe now pays 3.95% against a 4.49% Aave USDC borrow cost, the on-chain governance is weaker than Ethena's own docs claim on two counts (a 5-of-10 Safe where the docs say 7-of-10, and a 24-hour timelock where the docs say 7 days), and the backing composition is genuinely unmeasurable: Ethena's live documentation still states 90% perpetual futures while secondary reporting says 11%. |
| Euler | caution | Lending | 2026-08-05 | Excellent core contracts and a fully repaid $197M V1 exploit, but V2 lets any vault deployer pick its own oracle, and that surface already blew up in November 2025 while TVL fell 83% from its peak. |
| Hyperliquid | caution | Perp / funding | 2026-08-05 | Still the deepest perp book with no core exploit, but HIP-3 delegates oracle control to outside deployers who now carry 36% of platform open interest, and one of them liquidated $57.4M of positions on 2026-07-27. The draft's central claim is wrong: the deployer voluntarily repaid the roughly $17.4M of realized losses, which is exactly what no protocol mechanism could have done. |
| Kinetiq | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-08-05 | Kinetiq is the best-built HYPE liquid staking token on the board and its accounting reproduces to the wei, but one 4-of-8 Safe with no timelock owns the proxy admin of all six core contracts, holds every management and pause role, and can grant itself the right to mint kHYPE in a single call, while the fast exit is about $12.3M of instant-pool plus DEX depth against $814M of kHYPE that already broke to 0.8802. |
| Maple | caution | Lending | 2026-08-05 | Maple is institutional onchain credit: real yield, Tier-1 audits, no protocol exploit, and this run the protocol's own contracts confirm zero recognised losses and a near-empty withdrawal queue, so the ~6% TVL decline is not credit stress. It stays a caution because you underwrite borrower credit and in-house underwriting, the pools are 96% lent out behind a documented 30-day redemption ceiling, and the collateral custody path is still not publicly documented. |
| Pendle | solid | Fixed yield | 2026-08-05 | The contracts holding the showcase's money are verifiably immutable and ownerless on both relevant chains, but the timelock question two prior reports left open is now settled and the answer is that there is none, under a 3-of-5 Safe that has already paused the whole protocol once. |
| Sky | solid | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-05 | Sky remains the most battle-tested stablecoin design in DeFi, and this run proved more of it on-chain than the draft did: USDS has been upgraded exactly zero times (one Upgraded event, at deployment), it carries no freeze or blacklist, burn cannot confiscate, and exactly two wards exist. But three draft claims failed verification. The governance pause delay is not a one-way improvement: it reads 48h today yet was 24h as recently as 2026-05-01 and 30h through 2024, so it oscillates by spell. The PSM exit the draft calls your escape window can be halted instantly by LITE_PSM_MOM with no delay at all. And the quoted peg band of $0.948 to $1.057 uses only USDS's short history, omitting that the same system as DAI printed $0.882 in the March 2023 USDC depeg, which is precisely the transmission path the report flags. The collateral split and holder concentration are both unsourceable while $5.5B+ sits in off-chain institutional custody and reserves sit at 55% of their own floor, which is why this process would have downgraded it; the curator kept solid on the decade-long record and the absence of any red dimension, and the gap is stated in full below. |
| Spark | solid | Lending | 2026-08-05 | Sky's lending and savings Star, still clean at $4.598B: audit roster re-verified this run (not carried), no exploit in a 612-record hacks database, and the Liquidity Layer's direct Ethena position measured at about $100 against a $1.1B governance target. But this run broke four of the draft's claims. The Ethena wind-down is half the size the draft reported in reverse: the position peaked at $953.65M combined sUSDe plus USDe in August 2025, not $475M, because the draft read only one of the two legs, so governance has demonstrably drawn that line to 87 percent of target within the last twelve months. The $260M "USDT" line in the Liquidity Layer is not USDT: the ALM Proxy's on-chain USDT balance is exactly zero, and the figure matches both the $260M Anchorage allocation in Sky's June financials and the $260M OTC Bitcoin loan book CoinDesk reported, so roughly 6 percent of headline TVL is term credit presented under a stablecoin ticker. The rsETH dodge was routine low-utilization cleanup per Phoenix Labs, not a bridge-risk call, and the draft's "risk process" framing is withdrawn. SPK circulating supply is available after all at 3.038B of 10B, so that line is no longer _refresh_. |
| 3Jane | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-08-04 | The TVL crash our stale-verdict net flagged was not the fund shrinking: USD3's totalAssets is flat at 75,042,961.85 USDC and the share price rose 0.29% in 16 days, so there is no credit event. What collapsed is the exit: the vault's own maxWithdraw returns 3,559,316 USDC identically for all three large holders, 4.74% of the pool against 20.28% on 19 July, deployment is 95.26%, deposits are shut on-chain at the 75M cap, and 90.74% of assets are now off-chain paper and bank cash with Slope at 90.93% of the facility book and also acting as servicer. Three of the previous draft's darker claims did not survive checking and are corrected here: the Slope delinquency tape did render and is clean at 96.94% current with zero charge-offs; the Morpho PT loop's borrow rate fell to 6.46% rather than rising to 10.10%, so carry widened rather than compressed; and the honest exit path is about 5.0M, not 9.2M. Against that, oracle risk is worse than described and now verified rather than carried: the Morpho USD3/USDC market values 17.7M of collateral using the vault's own share price with all four external feeds set to the zero address, and the PT market's oracle is a pure 30%/yr time clock that cannot see credit at all. |
| Pacifica | avoid | Perp / funding | 2026-08-03 | Solana perp DEX where both 2TOP short legs sit: custody is deposit-to-venue with no documented unilateral exit, the program that moves deposits is upgradeable by a plain on-curve key rather than the on-chain multisig the docs claim, and the only named audit (BlockSec) returns 404 and is absent from the firm's own site. Mitigating: the program has not been upgraded since roughly launch, 94.6% of USDC sits cold, and the fourteen-month record is clean. |
| Ondo OUSG | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-26 | Qualified-purchaser-only tokenised Treasury fund that is really a fund of tokenised funds: 36.76% State Street SWEEP, 24.73% BlackRock BUIDL, 18.87% Franklin BENJI, 18.33% Fidelity FYOXX. Instant 24/7 mint and redeem from 5,000 dollars, 0% fee until January 2027, SEC-registered adviser - but it is a 3(c)(7) fund, so almost no ordinary subscriber can legally hold it, and the administrator, custodian and auditor are not named publicly. |
| Ondo USDY | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-26 | Tokenized US Treasury note from a bankruptcy-remote SPV with Ankura Trust as collateral agent, 105.45% collateralisation and a deep audit roster - the credit side is about as clean as this category gets. It gates to caution on control and access rather than credit: the token contract is a verified upgradeable proxy, every transfer checks allowlist, blocklist and sanctions contracts, Ondo used that freeze power in April 2026, buyers must be non-US and cannot transfer for 40 days after purchase. |
| Makina | avoid | Fixed yield | 2026-07-20 | Makina is well-audited vault infrastructure, but the dUSD Machine fails a $1M market-neutral mandate on three independently verified grounds: deposits and redemptions are both allowlist-gated on-chain (isWhitelistEnabled() returns true on the dUSD Depositor and Redeemer), the strategy is a discretionary multi-strategy USD book (lending, AMM LP, Pendle and Spectra PT, leverage looping) rather than a basis vehicle, and this exact Machine was the vehicle in a $4.13M AUM/share-price manipulation on 2026-01-20. Governance, which the draft could not resolve, is now fully verified: a 3-of-5 DAO Safe holds every config and upgrade role behind a 48-hour on-chain execution delay, with a 2-of-4 Security Council able to cancel non-admin operations. |
| Re | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-20 | Re's reinsurance yield is real and the plumbing holds up under direct inspection: the 48h timelock answers 172800 on-chain, all 52 Hacken findings across three engagements are marked resolved with none accepted or mitigated, and the Ethereum redemption buffer sits at 27.5% of reUSD supply value today. Exit is what gates the verdict. The senior token's fallback below the 1% floor is quarterly-window-only rather than a rolling queue, the Curve pool the docs call the primary reUSD exit holds $462k, the junior token's first redemption window in protocol history is already oversubscribed against a $1.5M pool, and the observed buffer is roughly half the protocol's own stated policy of at least 50% of the deposit high-water mark. |
| Saturn | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-20 | Two of the three published upgrade conditions are now genuinely met: four real audit reports, downloaded and read in full this run, covering the actual core contracts, and a named custody chain (Clear Street custodian, BVI professional fund, Securitize administrator), so avoid moves to caution. The third fails unchanged: both timelocks still have a single plain-EOA proposer, re-verified on-chain this run. New and worse than the draft recorded, sUSDat fell to $0.7478 on 2026-06-28, about 26 percent below its late-May level, and sits at $0.8787 today while STRC closed at $85.29 on Friday, roughly 15 percent under its $100 stated amount. |
| USD.ai | caution | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-20 | PT-sUSDai on Arbitrum pays about 9.9% implied into 15 Oct 2026 and an $80k PT sale moves the Pendle price only 0.05%, but the draft's two central claims were wrong on the facts: the upgrade key is identifiable (a 48-hour OpenZeppelin timelock behind a 3-of-3 Safe, verified on-chain, and it executed a live implementation swap on 14 Jul 2026), and the protocol is not quiet, with TVL down about 71% from its Nov 2025 peak of $702M to $206.5M. It stays caution, sized as credit, because the money-moving roles sit outside that timelock on three shared signer keys and the collateral is off-chain. |
| Rysk | caution | Fixed yield | 2026-07-18 | Clean covered-call mechanics (fully collateralized, physically settled per docs, real premium yield) but upgradeable custody under a 3-of-5 multisig with no timelock at any level of the verified upgrade path, audit reports that would not open even though Rysk's own site names Trust Security, unnamed RFQ buyers, and a hard lock until expiry gate it to caution. |
| Global Dollar | solid | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-14 | Regulated, T-bill-backed, par-redeemable Paxos stablecoin now attested monthly by KPMG LLP (ISCA standards), with on-chain admin power verified directly from the source; the real caveats are custodial (Paxos-controlled roles can freeze, wipe and upgrade) and growth that leans on paid distribution. |
| Babylon | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-04 | Native, self-custodial BTC staking (a real design win over bridged-BTC models), but slashing puts principal at risk, exit takes ~7 days, and the stack is young with a high-severity consensus bug patched as recently as Dec 2025. |
| Exponent | caution | Fixed yield | 2026-07-04 | Solana Pendle-analogue with genuinely deep audit coverage (six firms, twenty-plus reports, open-source Core, verified builds, $250k bounty) and no known exploit; older and more used than it first appears (live since early 2025, ~17 months, now ~26% below its July-2025 ATH), but Core program upgrade authority and oracle are both unverified this run. |
| Lombard | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-04 | LBTC is Babylon-staked BTC held by a 14-member 2/3 consortium with HSM keys and an independent Bascule second-check layer; deeply and continuously audited with no direct incident, but custody trust plus upgradeable contracts behind a roughly one-hour timelock plus Babylon dependency plus youth keep it at caution. |
| Neutrl | avoid | Stables / RWA | 2026-07-04 | A young (public mainnet Nov 2025) CeFi-dependent synthetic dollar earning basis and OTC-discount yield, with real named audits but a February 2026 integration exploit, a March 2026 DNS/frontend hijack, whitelisted KYC-gated redemption behind a cooldown, and admin-key/timelock opacity. |
| Jupiter | caution | Perp / funding | 2026-07-03 | Solana's dominant DeFi suite (swap router, ~$730M JLP perps pool, young Fluid-based lender, JupSOL LST, launchpad, JUP token) runs a real ~$410M/yr fee engine with no exploit of its own programs on record, but upgradeable programs with only partly verified upgrade authorities, JLP's trader-counterparty tail risk (now mid-swap into Jupiter's own JupUSD), a sub-year lending arm, and 2025's governance trust breakdown hold it at caution. |
| Uniswap | solid | DEX / AMM | 2026-07-03 | Immutable v2/v3 core with zero exploits across $2.75T of volume and real fee yield; the only blemish in the lineage is a small April 2020 reentrancy drain of a long-deprecated v1 pool. Residual risks are per-pool (v4 hooks, thin-pool TWAPs) and impermanent loss, not the core protocol. |
| Tydro | caution | Perp / funding | 2026-07-02 | Kraken/Ink Foundation white-label Aave v3 lending market on the Ink L2: battle-tested codebase and a cleanly handled oracle scare, but unnamed auditors, an unverified admin signer set, points-driven deposits, and an 88 percent TVL drawdown from the $506M January peak gate it to caution. |
| World Liberty Financial | avoid | Points farms | 2026-07-02 | Politically affiliated token and stablecoin complex whose USD1 contract carries on-chain owner powers to mint, freeze, drain and reallocate holder funds behind an upgradeable proxy, whose team blacklisted 270+ WLFI wallets in Sep 2025, and whose economics are majority-insider per Reuters; two reds on fund-loss surfaces gate it to avoid. |
| Compound | solid | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Battle-tested over-collateralized lender; v3 isolates risk per market, governance runs through a ~1-week timelock, and user deposits have never been drained. The honest record includes two contained incidents that cost no depositor principal: the September 2021 COMP-rewards over-distribution bug (which DefiLlama does list as a $147M exploit) and the July 2024 governance attack where a whale bloc pushed a proposal to redirect treasury COMP. |
| Dolomite | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Well-audited, largely immutable money market with a clean core track record, but a current WLFI-collateral concentration and a ~93%-utilization USD1 pool trap depositors, forcing caution. |
| Drift | avoid | Perp / funding | 2026-07-01 | Largest Solana perp DEX, but drained of ~$285M (over half its TVL) in an April 1 2026 governance-takeover hack; users not yet made whole and the protocol is mid-reboot, so it is uninvestable today. |
| edgeX | caution | Perp / funding | 2026-07-01 | Non-custodial StarkEx perp DEX with a strong audit set and an L1 escape hatch, but instant contract upgradeability (no timelock) is a live admin fund-loss vector, and a fresh insider-supply / token-crash scandal on the newly launched EDGE token gates it to caution. |
| Ether.fi | solid | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | The largest liquid restaking token, deeply audited with a 10-day upgrade timelock and an onchain rule that no key can seize user funds; core staking risk is low, with yellows on the upgradeable admin and the actively-managed Liquid vaults. The native withdrawal queue absorbed a ~20%-of-assets redemption wave in April 2026 without breaking peg. |
| Ethereal | caution | Points farms | 2026-07-01 | Non-custodial USDe perps appchain (Arbitrum settlement, Celestia DA) where our HYPE short lives; audited by ChainSecurity and Guardian (clean severity), but its own audit documents a fully trusted, upgradeable admin proxy and a single fully trusted sequencer whose keys could move user funds, plus a LayerZero exit path. |
| Felix | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | A licensed Liquity V2 CDP fork minting feUSD on HyperEVM, audited by Dedaub, Coinspect and Three Sigma with an immutable CDP core and no incident to date, but young, concentrated in HYPE collateral, dependent on Redstone oracles on a young chain, and now paired with a curated Morpho-based money market that widens the operator surface. |
| Fluid | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Strong, well-audited capital-efficient lender whose own contracts have never been exploited, but with two real 2026 marks: a ~$215k operational-key compromise on the rewards infra (not principal), and a ~$21M bad-debt hit its lending markets took from listed Resolv (USR) collateral that Fluid covered from treasury. Core code is solid; the risk sits in listed-collateral quality, a discretionary backstop, and a young, novel liquidation engine. |
| Jupiter Lend | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Jupiter-branded Solana money market on Fluid tech: heavily audited (7 audits by 4 firms plus separate Certora formal verification and a Code4rena contest), but under a year old, upgradeable, and its "isolated vaults" all draw on one shared, rehypothecated liquidity pool (a contagion claim the team's COO had to publicly retract). |
| Kamino | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Solana's deepest lending, liquidity, and leverage venue, deeply audited with a genuinely clean zero-bad-debt record through real 2025 stress. It does not clear solid for one reason: the K-Lend program that holds deposits is upgradeable under a Squads multisig with no on-chain timelock, so admin power over your funds is fast and few-key-controlled. |
| KernelDAO (Kelp) | avoid | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | Kelp rsETH suffered a ~$292M unbacked-mint bridge exploit in April 2026 (largest DeFi hack of the year); backing was restored to ~100% by an Aave-led rescue coalition, but the recent nine-figure fund-loss event gates this to avoid until the reworked bridge earns a fresh track record. |
| Lido | solid | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | The reference ETH liquid-staking protocol: deeply audited, Dual-Governance timelocked with stETH-holder veto, no core exploit in 5+ years, real (not emitted) yield; watch the 9-member oracle committee and peg-and-queue exit timing, not the contracts. |
| Mellow | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | Well-audited, unexploited modular restaking infrastructure where your real risk is the specific curator and vault you pick: one Mellow-co-curated MetaVault (Lido EarnETH) froze exits 27 days in the April 2026 KelpDAO fallout before depositors were made whole. |
| Morpho | solid | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Morpho Blue is an immutable, formally verified lending primitive that gates to solid; the real risk lives one layer up, at the Vault curator and per-market oracle you choose. |
| Puffer | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | Multiply-audited pufETH with a healthy repricing peg and a real withdrawal path, but a collapsed and shrinking TVL, an upgradeable admin surface, now-live EigenLayer slashing exposure, and a 2025 front-end/social hijack keep it at caution, not solid. |
| Save | caution | Lending | 2026-07-01 | Save is the July 2024 rebrand of Solend, a small, upgradeable Solana lending protocol with a documented incident history (2021 admin-config exploit, 2022 governance-overreach vote, 2022 oracle exploit) and stale audit coverage, so treat it as caution, not solid. |
| Symbiotic | caution | Restaking / LRT | 2026-07-01 | Deeply audited, reputable-backed restaking coordination layer with an immutable core, but fund loss is by design (network-defined slashing), gated by per-vault curator trust, and the just-shipped Core V2 code is unproven. |
| YieldBasis | caution | Fixed yield | 2026-07-01 | Well-audited immutable Curve-adjacent protocol from the Curve founder that cancels LP impermanent loss with 2x leverage, but constant leverage, a crvUSD dependency, a ~9-month unproven-in-crisis track record, a live emergency-admin kill key, and concentrated insider supply now unlocking keep it at caution. |
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