S&P Global Starts Grading the $10 Billion Crypto Vault Market

S&P Global Ratings just started grading crypto lending vaults — the pooled onchain products that now hold roughly $10 billion in deposits.

What the scorecard actually measures

The new Vault Risk Assessment scores a vault across six factors: portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatch, the curator running the strategy, blockchain risk, protocol risk, and vault security and governance. It is a forward-looking opinion on how likely a depositor is to take a loss. It is not a credit rating, and it says nothing about the yield a vault advertises. Analyst Lisa Schroeer said a material weakness in any single factor can constrain the overall assessment, because a strong score elsewhere does not offset it.

Why vaults got big enough to rate

Deposits in digital asset lending vaults climbed from about $1.5 billion two years ago to $10 billion by September 2026. Morpho says more than $11 billion now sits in curated vaults, and Coinbase and Robinhood each pushed past $500 million through their earn products in September alone. Distribution kept expanding too: Kraken rolled out yield vaults for tokenized Nvidia, S&P 500 and Invesco QQQ exposure, with lending strategies run onchain.

The track record is the argument

The demand for an outside opinion lands after a rough stretch. Term Finance lost an estimated $8.5 million in August when an attacker took governance control of its Meta Vaults — roughly 68% of what the product held — and Term shut those vaults down for good. Earlier this month, an unnamed vault on Base lost about $6 million in Aave receipt tokens after a freshly created contract was added to its borrowing whitelist.

S&P has not named the first vaults it will assess, and a label will not change what is inside them. Still, for anyone about to deposit into a curated vault, a public risk score from a ratings giant is a new pressure point — and a new box to tick before chasing APY.