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The Vaults.fyi Reputation Score is a proprietary metric that gives you a single, objective number to assess how battle-tested a vault is. It is not a comprehensive risk rating — it is a signal about how long a protocol has secured significant capital, and how well the underlying assets and blockchain have held up over time.

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What reputation scores measure

The score favors protocols that are “Lindy” — the longer a protocol has secured large amounts of capital without incident, the higher it scores. A low Reputation Score does not mean a vault is unsafe; it means the vault has not yet accumulated the track record that the score rewards.
Reputation Scores complement — but do not replace — detailed risk reviews from auditors and risk managers like LlamaRisk, Chaos Labs, and Gauntlet. Use scores for programmatic filtering; use risk reports for deeper due diligence.

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Scoring dimensions

Vaults.fyi breaks the Reputation Score into five weighted dimensions:
Measures the scale of trust a protocol has earned over its operational history. The score captures how much TVL the protocol has secured and for how long, using logarithmic scaling to prevent a handful of massive protocols from dominating. A protocol with $500M TVL sustained for two years scores significantly better than one that briefly touched the same TVL for a week.
Accounts for liquidity characteristics at the individual pool level, not just the protocol level. A large protocol can host pools with very different liquidity profiles — for example, Aave v3 USDT on mainnet (5BTVL)behavesdifferentlyfromAavev3pyUSDonmainnet(5B TVL) behaves differently from Aave v3 pyUSD on mainnet (12M TVL). This dimension scores each pool individually using the same TVL-over-time approach as the protocol integrity component.
Measures holder distribution and diversity. More unique holders indicate broader trust and reduce concentration risk. Future improvements to this dimension will include filtering low-value addresses, distinguishing individual holders from protocol-owned positions, and analyzing the ability of large holders to exit and affect liquidity.
Evaluates the stability and creditworthiness of the vault’s deposit asset. For stablecoins and pegged assets (ETH/BTC derivatives), this dimension measures historical price stability relative to the peg, plus/minus 2% liquidity depth in on-chain markets, and CEX and DEX trading volume. Assets with a consistent peg and deep liquidity score higher.
Assesses the maturity and security of the network the vault runs on. For Ethereum L2s, Vaults.fyi uses the L2Beat Stages framework as input. For alt-L1s like Polygon and Gnosis, the score is set at the equivalent of a Stage 0 L2. Mainnet Ethereum scores highest by default.

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Interpreting scores

Higher scores indicate a longer track record securing significant capital on a well-established chain with a stable underlying asset. A high score does not guarantee safety — it means the vault has passed more of the tests that time imposes.
Reputation Scores do not incorporate smart contract audit results, governance risk, or nuanced risk assessments of protocol architecture. Do not use them as a substitute for security research.

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Using scores to filter vaults

You can filter the detailed-vaults API response to only return vaults above a minimum score threshold using the minVaultScore query parameter: 
GET /v2/detailed-vaults?minVaultScore=60
This is useful when building integrations where you want to surface only established vaults to end users, without needing to maintain your own allowlist.
Set minVaultScore to match your product’s risk tolerance. Consumer wallets typically want higher thresholds (70+). Yield aggregators serving sophisticated users may set lower thresholds to capture emerging opportunities.
Reputation Scores are also visible in the Vaults.fyi app at app.vaults.fyi and returned in every response from the detailed vaults endpoint.

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Known limitations

The score is objective and formula-driven, which means it has edges. A genuinely risky protocol with a long history can score well. A well-audited new protocol will score low until it builds a track record. Keep these limitations in mind when making risk decisions.
  • The score does not account for governance risk, upgrade mechanisms, or admin key exposure.
  • Networks not rated by L2Beat may not have blockchain security scores.
  • Smart contract audit status is not currently a direct input to the score.
For a deeper explanation of the methodology and the thinking behind the Lindy-based approach, read the Vaults.fyi reputation score blog post.