S&P Global Ratings on Monday launched a risk assessment framework for digital lending vaults, as deposits in such products rose to about $10 billion in September.

Six assessment factors with no category prioritization

The new methodology analyzes vaults across six areas: portfolio credit quality risk, liquidity mismatch risk, curator risk, blockchain risk, protocol risk, and vault security and governance risk. The assessments are designed to indicate potential loss risk for investors, but are not credit ratings and do not evaluate returns. The approach does not prioritize any single category: significant weakness in any factor can limit the overall assessment.

Deposits rose from $1.5B in two years; first VRAs to come later

According to S&P, deposits in lending vaults reached about $10 billion in September, up from $1.5 billion two years earlier. The company plans to publish the first vault risk assessments (VRA) in future announcements, without disclosing which products will be evaluated first.

The vault market expands and draws regulatory attention

Vaults pool investor funds and allocate them according to predefined strategies managed by smart contracts or curators; depositors receive share and revenue tokens. In February, Wallet in Telegram launched self-custodial vaults for BTC, ETH, and USDT based on Morpho, TAC, and Re7. In May, Kraken introduced a Bitcoin vault using Veda and curated by Sentora, attracting $30 million from 4,000 wallets in the first 10 hours. In September, this model extended to tokenized securities—Kraken launched vaults for tokenized Nvidia shares, as well as SPDR S&P 500 and Invesco QQQ ETFs.

The segment's growth has been accompanied by incidents and legal uncertainty. In August, the Term Finance protocol lost an estimated $8.5 million due to the takeover of its Meta Vaults. In the US, vaults remain in a "gray area": in July, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce noted that certain vaults and on-chain lending products may fall under federal securities laws depending on their structure and governance principles.