S&P Global Ratings, a division of S&P Global, has launched a Vault Risk Assessment, a new analytical approach for digital asset lending vaults, the company said. Vaults are investment vehicles that run on a blockchain, pool investor deposits and deploy them under defined strategies. Deposits reached US$10 billion as of September 2026, up from US$1.5 billion two years earlier.
The assessment is a forward-looking opinion on the relative risk that an investor's position in a lending vault will be impaired. It covers six risk factors: portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatch, curator risk, blockchain risk, protocol risk, and vault security and governance. S&P Global Ratings said the assessment is not a credit rating and does not address yield levels, and that it will publish its first Vault Risk Assessments in later announcements. Further detail on the approach, including its letter-based scale, is available at the Vault Risk Assessment page.
Yann Le Pallec, president of S&P Global Ratings, said that as digital assets become more institutional, independent risk assessments that connect traditional finance with decentralized innovation are needed. James Wiemken, executive managing director and head of global ratings services, said vaults mark a step in onchain finance and offer new routes to pooled investment and capital efficiency, but that their complexity and differing disclosure standards mean a standardized, independent risk view is required.
S&P Global said its recent digital-asset work includes the first Stablecoin Stability Assessments, the first credit rating of a DeFi protocol, and its first rating of a structured finance transaction backed by bitcoin. In September 2026 it announced an agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin, which it described as the security standard for onchain finance.