Compound scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius and shortfall record. Compound ranks #6 and Aave #8 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
Compound74
vs
AAAave71
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #6 and #8 of 8
Compound scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius and shortfall record.
Compound #6 of 874
AAAave #8 of 871
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termCompound leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; Aave on 0. The terms sum to the gap.
TermCompoundAaveWeightPoints
Blast radius7/106/105.8+1.5for Compound+0.8 of 32
Shortfall record8/107/104.8+1.2for Compound+0.6 of 32
Net of the terms+2.7
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread+0.1
Reproduced gap+2.9
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below7471+3.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
CompoundScore 74COMP-governed onchain money market whose Compound III (Comet) design gives each market exactly one borrowable base asset and a set of capped, non-lent collateral assets, priced by a single named Chainlink feed per asset with no published deviation bound, and liquidated whole by an absorb call paid out of protocol reserves.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Compound now has one of the cleanest RATE disclosures in this pool and one of the thinnest ORACLE disclosures, and a buyer who conflates the two will misprice it. Four specific traps. First, the page that tells you what liquidates you — https://docs.compound.finance/liquidation/ — never names an oracle at all ("This function uses the price returned by the protocol’s price feed"); Chainlink is named two clicks away on the helper-functions page, and a machine check of all nine Compound doc pages returns zero occurrences of deviation, heartbeat, staleness, median, fallback, killswitch or price bound. The one bounded feed Compound ever ran — the multisig-settable min/max and constant-price override added to rsETH after the 18 April 2026 Kelp bridge exploit — was REVERTED in May 2026 via Proposal 586, so as of today no Compound market carries a numeric price bound. Second, the docs registry is a snapshot, not live state: stamped 2026-02-28, it still advertises rsETH on the Ethereum USDC Comet at 85% borrow CF and a 1,500-token supply cap when the on-chain cap has since been set to 0, and it still lists ten mainnet networks when six of them — Polygon, Unichain, Linea, Mantle, Ronin and Scroll — are approved for deprecation with supply caps zeroed, collateral factors halved and supply rates being set to 0%. Read the Comet and the forum, not the docs table. Third, the one-week governance timelock that makes Compound's rate authorship trustworthy does NOT cover the emergency path: the Community Multi-Sig pause guardian can freeze withdrawals instantly (it did so across six networks in April 2026), and a 0% collateral factor mechanically locks collateral until debt is fully repaid — both disclosed on the forum, neither in the docs. Fourth, the named backstop is real but shrinking and undocumented at the tail: reserves on the Ethereum WETH Comet fell from 921.22 to 908.46 WETH between 10 May and 5 August 2026 because the comet "retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization", no Compound page says what happens once reserves are exhausted, and Compound discloses its losses well on comp.xyz and not at all on either page titled Security.AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactCompoundAave
PricingSnapshotCompound III charges no subscription, listing or curator fee; the protocol's take is the spread between separate supply and borrow curves that governance sets. The Interest Rates page (https://docs.compound.finance/interest-rates/, fetched 28 September 2026): "Users with a positive balance of the base asset earn interest, denominated in the base asset, based on a supply rate model; users with a negative balance pay interest based on a borrow rate model. These are separate interest rate models, and set by governance." Compound publishes the size of that spread only per proposal on its forum. For the Ethereum WETH Comet, Gauntlet's 5 August 2026 post (https://www.comp.xyz/t/ethereum-weth-comet-borrow-rate-irm-updates/7999, fetched 28 September 2026) states "Compound v3 has no reserve factor parameter" and prints the implied reserve factor as "0.00%" at the kink and "10.00%" at full utilisation, adding "The comet currently retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization." Comets being wound down are repriced by the same route: a 2 September 2026 forum proposal sets the Ethereum wstETH Comet's supply rate to zero ahead of deprecation. Live per-market APYs are on-chain only, so no APY is quoted.Aave charges no deposit or curator fee; suppliers earn borrower interest net of each reserve's reserve factor, and both rates float on a two-slope utilisation curve. The Interest Rate Strategy page (https://aave.com/docs/aave-v3/smart-contracts/interest-rate-strategy, fetched 28 September 2026): "Implements the calculation of the interest rates depending on the reserve state. The model of interest rate is based on two slopes" around the OPTIMAL_USAGE_RATIO kink. Aave's docs carry no live values (https://aave.com/docs/resources/parameters still shows only an SDK pointer); the numbers are published per change on the governance forum. LlamaRisk's Risk Steward post of 28 September 2026 (https://governance.aave.com/t/risk-stewards-cap-and-irm-changes-on-aave-v3-2026-09-28/25718) gives USDT on Aave V3 Core: "At the current 92.8% utilization, the post-change variable borrow rate would be 4.34% APR, down from 4.39% under the current IRM, and the supply rate would be 3.63% APR, down from 3.67%." It also states the protocol's take on one asset: "the 25% reserve factor that applies to USDe on all five reserves". Rates reprice every block with utilisation; these are point-in-time figures, not a quote.
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
Custody modelEditorialNon-custodial: no company holds the coinsNon-custodial: no company holds the coins
From the published criteria
Which should you pick?
Compound
74#6 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Compound if blast radius matters most — it scores 7/10 to Aave's 6/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Compound now has one of the cleanest RATE disclosures in this pool and one of the thinnest ORACLE disclosures, and a buyer who conflates the two will misprice it. Four specific traps. First, the page that tells you what liquidates you — https://docs.compound.finance/liquidation/ — never names an oracle at all ("This function uses the price returned by the protocol’s price feed"); Chainlink is named two clicks away on the helper-functions page, and a machine check of all nine Compound doc pages returns zero occurrences of deviation, heartbeat, staleness, median, fallback, killswitch or price bound. The one bounded feed Compound ever ran — the multisig-settable min/max and constant-price override added to rsETH after the 18 April 2026 Kelp bridge exploit — was REVERTED in May 2026 via Proposal 586, so as of today no Compound market carries a numeric price bound. Second, the docs registry is a snapshot, not live state: stamped 2026-02-28, it still advertises rsETH on the Ethereum USDC Comet at 85% borrow CF and a 1,500-token supply cap when the on-chain cap has since been set to 0, and it still lists ten mainnet networks when six of them — Polygon, Unichain, Linea, Mantle, Ronin and Scroll — are approved for deprecation with supply caps zeroed, collateral factors halved and supply rates being set to 0%. Read the Comet and the forum, not the docs table. Third, the one-week governance timelock that makes Compound's rate authorship trustworthy does NOT cover the emergency path: the Community Multi-Sig pause guardian can freeze withdrawals instantly (it did so across six networks in April 2026), and a 0% collateral factor mechanically locks collateral until debt is fully repaid — both disclosed on the forum, neither in the docs. Fourth, the named backstop is real but shrinking and undocumented at the tail: reserves on the Ethereum WETH Comet fell from 921.22 to 908.46 WETH between 10 May and 5 August 2026 because the comet "retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization", no Compound page says what happens once reserves are exhausted, and Compound discloses its losses well on comp.xyz and not at all on either page titled Security.
AA
Aave
71#8 of 8
Pick it when
Aave leads Compound on no published criterion and no score dimension — pick it only if a fact outside the score (country, funding rail, custody) decides for you.
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Self-identify in 10 seconds
Which one is actually for you?
CompoundLeads
Choose Compound if blast radius matters most
Blast radius: 7/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 24)
Shortfall record: 8/10 against 7/10 for Aave (weight 20)
CompoundScore 74COMP-governed onchain money market whose Compound III (Comet) design gives each market exactly one borrowable base asset and a set of capped, non-lent collateral assets, priced by a single named Chainlink feed per asset with no published deviation bound, and liquidated whole by an absorb call paid out of protocol reserves.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Compound now has one of the cleanest RATE disclosures in this pool and one of the thinnest ORACLE disclosures, and a buyer who conflates the two will misprice it. Four specific traps. First, the page that tells you what liquidates you — https://docs.compound.finance/liquidation/ — never names an oracle at all ("This function uses the price returned by the protocol’s price feed"); Chainlink is named two clicks away on the helper-functions page, and a machine check of all nine Compound doc pages returns zero occurrences of deviation, heartbeat, staleness, median, fallback, killswitch or price bound. The one bounded feed Compound ever ran — the multisig-settable min/max and constant-price override added to rsETH after the 18 April 2026 Kelp bridge exploit — was REVERTED in May 2026 via Proposal 586, so as of today no Compound market carries a numeric price bound. Second, the docs registry is a snapshot, not live state: stamped 2026-02-28, it still advertises rsETH on the Ethereum USDC Comet at 85% borrow CF and a 1,500-token supply cap when the on-chain cap has since been set to 0, and it still lists ten mainnet networks when six of them — Polygon, Unichain, Linea, Mantle, Ronin and Scroll — are approved for deprecation with supply caps zeroed, collateral factors halved and supply rates being set to 0%. Read the Comet and the forum, not the docs table. Third, the one-week governance timelock that makes Compound's rate authorship trustworthy does NOT cover the emergency path: the Community Multi-Sig pause guardian can freeze withdrawals instantly (it did so across six networks in April 2026), and a 0% collateral factor mechanically locks collateral until debt is fully repaid — both disclosed on the forum, neither in the docs. Fourth, the named backstop is real but shrinking and undocumented at the tail: reserves on the Ethereum WETH Comet fell from 921.22 to 908.46 WETH between 10 May and 5 August 2026 because the comet "retains none of the interest borrowers pay at its optimal utilization", no Compound page says what happens once reserves are exhausted, and Compound discloses its losses well on comp.xyz and not at all on either page titled Security.
AAAave
Aave leads Compound on no published criterion
Choose it only if something outside the published criteria decides for you — your country, a funding rail, or custody.
AaveScore 71The reference shared-pool money market: it publishes the loss waterfall, the risk-steward mandate and its own incident arithmetic in more detail than anyone in the category, and publishes no deviation threshold or heartbeat anywhere for the price that actually liquidates you.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Read the April 2026 rsETH incident report before you supply anything to a WETH reserve — https://governance.aave.com/t/rseth-incident-report-april-20-2026/24580 — but read it together with its 2026-05-09 sequel, because the outcome was better than the report's models. An exploit entirely outside Aave (a 1-of-1 DVN bridge on someone else's LRT) put 89,567 rsETH ($221.39M) of collateral into Aave markets against $190.86M of WETH borrows. LlamaRisk modelled $123.7M-$230.1M of bad debt landing on ordinary WETH suppliers by reserve write-down — but those were explicitly labelled hypothetical scenarios, and per https://governance.aave.com/t/direct-to-aip-weth-unfreeze-and-ltv-restoration-across-aave-v3-instances/24878 the attacker's Aave positions were liquidated on 2026-05-06, all 89,567 rsETH was recovered, and the residual was covered by the DeFi United coalition. What you should still price is the machinery the event exposed, which has not changed: the Umbrella backstop covers Ethereum Core only and was PAUSED rather than drawn, so an Arbitrum, Base or Mantle supplier has no backstop at all; every affected WETH reserve sat at 100% utilisation with "idle balances below $20 on every chain", meaning a supplier with a perfectly healthy position could not withdraw; and the collateral that caused it was priced by an oracle whose deviation threshold and heartbeat appear nowhere in Aave's 91-page documentation corpus. None of this appears on https://aave.com/security, which still says "zero bad debt".
Criterion by criterion
Scorecard
Published criteria · weight in points of 868 of 8 cells scored. Strength is read from the evidence file; the weight is the published one. Methodology
Oracle liquidation price
weight 7.7 of 86Tie
Compound6/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Compound9/10 out of 10
Aave9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Compound leads
Compound7/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 1 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Compound leads
Compound8/10 out of 10
Aave7/10 out of 10
Score dimensions
weights sum to 86
The published score is five dimensions, each weighted for the category. "Published criteria" is the criteria block above; the other four are the engine's own terms — availability, friction, trust record, measured data. Each bar is one side's points out of that dimension's maximum; the weight beside the name is its points of the 86-point weighted total. The published criteria above can fill 24 of the block’s 30. A weight marked “constant here” belongs to a dimension every ranked product in the category holds at the same value: it still counts in the total, and it orders nothing here.
Availabilityweight 20 of 86 · constant here
Compound14/20Aave14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Compound17.7/30Aave16.6/30
Compound leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Compound2.7/10Aave2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Compound3.2/8Aave3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Compound8.3/18Aave8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Compound unless the term Aave leads on is the one you are buying.
Aave leads Compound on no published criterion and no score dimension — pick it only if a fact outside the score (country, funding rail, custody) decides for you.
The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .
From the published order
Next best action
If this isn't your case
Other matchups worth comparing
How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores
Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
Scored by Who sets your rate — a utilisation curve or a curator? · 24% (Compound 9/10, Aave 9/10)
Oracle failure: a wrong price or outcome liquidates or settles a position.
Scored by What price gets you liquidated, and how far can it drift? · 32% (Compound 6/10, Aave 6/10)
Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
Scored by If one market goes bad, how much of yours goes with it? · 24% (Compound 7/10, Aave 6/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Compound 8/10, Aave 7/10)
Not assessed by this ranking: Contract failure, Regulatory failure, Execution failure, Exit failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Compound scores 3 points above Aave, led by blast radius and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Compound 74 (rank 6 of 8 lending & borrowing), Aave 71 (rank 8 of 8).
Reviewed means both products compared here was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.
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