S&P Introduces Vault Risk Assessment for On-Chain Lending Vaults

S&P Global Ratings has launched a Vault Risk Assessment framework for on-chain lending vaults, designed to assess impairment risk in the sector. The framework reviews six risk areas, including portfolio quality, liquidity, curators, blockchains, protocols, and governance.

The Vault Risk Assessment framework uses a familiar letter symbol system with a '(v)' suffix, where AAA(v) represents the lowest risk. However, S&P emphasized that this assessment is not a traditional credit rating and does not guarantee a vault's credit quality.

The framework covers lending vaults that place digital assets into blockchain-based lending markets, and it can also cover markets where loans are backed by crypto assets or tokenized real-world asset collateral.

According to S&P, deposits in on-chain lending vaults reached $10 billion in September 2026, up from $1.5 billion two years earlier. The company said that initial vault assessments will be released in future announcements, but no individual lending vault received a VRA when the system was launched.