In the wake of its TRUST Summit at Nasdaq MarketSite, where bank and ratings executives debated how to marry traditional finance standards with digital assets, blockchain security firm Hacken has unveiled what it calls a first-of-its-kind standard for measuring risk in crypto yield products: the Yield Risk Score, or YRS. The new Yield Audit and its D-to-AAA scoring framework aim to give both retail savers and institutional allocators a straightforward, third-party way to judge whether a yield is real, sustainable and resilient to contagion, a need made painfully obvious by high-profile failures this year and in prior market crashes.
Hacken’s move follows a day of frank conversations at the TRUST Summit in New York, where leaders from Nasdaq, Moody’s Ratings, S&P Global, Citi and major banks discussed the rising tide of institutional interest in digital assets and the gaps that still prevent large pools of capital from deploying. Stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets are forecast to balloon as banks secure licenses and look for sustainable yield, but institutional investors insist on auditability and independent verification before they commit.
The timing is hardly accidental. On November 3, Stream Finance disclosed an external manager had lost roughly $93 million of platform assets, a blow that sent its stablecoin plunging and forced the protocol to suspend deposits and withdrawals while lawyers probe the loss. The episode is the latest in a string of yield-related calamities that highlight the economic and dependency risks beyond smart-contract bugs.
Hacken’s own research, published alongside the service launch, underscores the scale of the problem: yield providers have been tied to roughly 55% of crypto losses, with 330 yield protocols losing an estimated $49 billion over the last five years. Those figures are the backbone of Hacken’s argument that DeFi needs an independent, auditable way to translate technical, economic and counterparty risk into a single, comparable metric.
Crypto’s Missing Credit Rating
The Yield Audit process is deliberately broader than a conventional smart-contract review. Instead of focusing only on code, Hacken assesses three interlocking pillars: the security and infrastructure layer (how custody, distribution logic and operational controls are set up), the financial sustainability of the promised yield (are returns backed by real revenue and stress-tested liquidity) and dependency or systemic risk (how exposed the product is to oracles, bridges, custodians and jurisdictional fragilities). Those three sub-scores are combined into the composite YRS, which projects can publish as a verified certificate while keeping proprietary details private.
“Banks are heavily regulated. Stablecoins are not,” said Dyma Budorin, Hacken Chairman and Co-Founder. He added, “Fund managers, in many cases, can’t even allocate liquidity unless a third party has reviewed the product.” Budorin explained that a high YRS is increasingly becoming the prerequisite for confidence, funding and liquidity growth. The sentiment echoes a broader industry shift: institutional participants want the same kinds of signals, independent audits, disclosure, and continuous monitoring that they rely on in legacy markets.
Hacken will back its scores with continuous monitoring through Extractor, the company’s real-time on- and off-chain threat detection and response platform, so YRS certificates can be kept current without forcing projects to reveal sensitive strategy details. That disclosure control, Hacken says, is key to striking a balance between market transparency and commercial confidentiality.
The launch also positions Hacken as a continuing bridge between traditional capital markets and crypto. The firm pioneered Proof of Reserves audits in the wake of exchange failures, and it has conducted high-profile verifications and security assessments for major industry players. Hacken argues that the Yield Audit plays the same role for yield products as credit ratings or audited disclosures do for fixed-income markets, a standardized label that asset managers and compliance teams can use when making allocation decisions.
Critically, the YRS isn’t only aimed at DeFi native projects. Hacken expects stablecoin wrappers, centralized exchange yield products, and tokenized real-world asset issuers to seek the rating as a way to unlock institutional tickets and attract sustainable total value locked (TVL). The Terra-Anchor collapse of 2022 remains the cautionary tale: promised double-digit yields that rested on refillable “yield reserves” and perpetual inflows imploded, vaporizing tens of billions and dragging large counterparties into ruin.
Regulators and allocators alike remember those systemic losses, and Hacken’s YRS is pitched as a tool to prevent repeats. Market reaction will be the real test. Hacken has spent years building credibility with smart-contract audits and Proof of Reserves services; whether the industry, and especially wary institutional allocators, will adopt the Yield Risk Score as a standard remains to be seen.
For now, the YRS offers a clear, auditable vocabulary for a market that desperately needs one: a way to say, in a single metric, whether a yield is backed by real economics or by clever accounting and counterparty risk. Hacken, founded in 2017 and trusted by hundreds of digital-asset leaders, is pitching Yield Audits as the missing credit-rating equivalent for crypto yield. If institutions heed that signal, the shape of yield markets, and the flow of trillions in coming years, could depend on it.
