Venus scores 10 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price, blast radius, and shortfall record. Venus ranks #1 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.
VEVenus81
vs
AAAave71
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #8 of 8
Venus scores 10 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price, blast radius, and shortfall record.
VEVenus #1 of 881
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 termVenus leads on 3 of 4 published criteria; Aave on 0. The terms sum to the gap.
TermVenusAaveWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price9/106/107.7+6.0for Venus+3.1 of 32
Blast radius7/106/105.8+1.5for Venus+0.8 of 32
Shortfall record9/107/104.8+2.5for Venus+1.3 of 32
Net of the terms+10.0
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.1
Reproduced gap+9.9
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below8171+10.0
Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.
VenusScore 81A shared-pool onchain money market whose BNB Chain book is 99.5% of the protocol and where, for that book, Venus publishes per-market oracle tiers with numeric cross-source bounds and links each tier to its deployed oracle contract - while its own forum carries dated, quantified post-mortems of the four times it lost lender money, including admissions its docs never repeat.Strength: Oracle liquidation price — 9/10Watch-out: Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.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.
FactVenusAave
PricingSnapshotVenus takes no deposit, withdrawal or curator fee on a direct Core supply; the protocol's take is each market's reserve factor. The Interest Rate Model page (https://docs-v4.venus.io/risk/interest-rate-model, fetched 28 September 2026) defines it inside the supply-rate formula - "For those models, if r_b is the borrow rate per slot and f is the reserve factor" - and states that it publishes no per-market value: "This is a model-selection overview, not a per-market configuration registry." The live values are API fields, not page text: https://api.venus.io/markets?chainId=56 on 28 September 2026 returned reserveFactorMantissa of 0.1 for USDT and USDC, 0.2 for ETH and 0.3 for BTCB and BNB, the largest BNB Core markets by borrows. The sentence this note carried until now (the old glossary definition of the reserve factor) is no longer on that page, which was rewritten about a month before this read.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?
VE
Venus
81#1 of 8
Leads
Pick it when
Pick Venus if oracle liquidation price matters most — it scores 9/10 to Aave's 6/10 there (weight 32).
Strength
Oracle liquidation price — 9/10
Tradeoff
Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.
AA
Aave
71#8 of 8
Pick it when
Aave leads Venus 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?
VEVenusLeads
Choose Venus if oracle liquidation price matters most
Oracle liquidation price: 9/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 32)
Blast radius: 7/10 against 6/10 for Aave (weight 24)
Shortfall record: 9/10 against 7/10 for Aave (weight 20)
VenusScore 81A shared-pool onchain money market whose BNB Chain book is 99.5% of the protocol and where, for that book, Venus publishes per-market oracle tiers with numeric cross-source bounds and links each tier to its deployed oracle contract - while its own forum carries dated, quantified post-mortems of the four times it lost lender money, including admissions its docs never repeat.Strength: Oracle liquidation price — 9/10Watch-out: Read https://docs-v4.venus.io/guides/isolated-pools-deprecation before you deposit - 'Venus isolated pools have been fully deprecated' - and then re-read the risk documentation knowing that. Almost everything Venus publishes about containing a loss automatically (the Shortfall auction, now paused - 'auctionsPaused() returned true' at a 27 Aug 2026 snapshot - and the healAccount write-off that 'records borrowBalance - actualRepayAmount as market badDebt') is scoped to those retired pools, and the risk-fund page, rewritten about a month before the 2026-09-28 read, says 'There is no universal on-chain function that automatically applies RiskFundV2 to every Venus bad-debt balance. Core Pool and isolated-pool accounting differ'. The FAQ still advertises isolated pools as preventing 'failures in one market from impacting others'. In practice a Core deficit is repaired only when governance votes to repair it from the Risk Fund - which it has done, twice, in full (VIP-564 2025-11-07, VIP-604 2026-03-30) - but that is a discretionary act, not a waterfall; the fund is on the order of 1% of Core debt, its balance is published nowhere, and the same page now calls it 'protocol-controlled funds allocated by governance; they are not a per-user insurance policy'. Second thing to read, and it is the one a leveraged holder underweights: the deprecation guide states that a missing price on any market in your position can block the exit - redeeming or calling exitMarket 'causes the Comptroller to check the account across all currently listed entered markets in that pool', and if the oracle 'still cannot produce a valid price for any required market, the operation can revert. exitMarket performs the same full-balance redeem check and generally cannot bypass that condition.' Third: the THE post-mortem concedes the published band did not stop the March 2026 attack - 'the BoundValidator reverted for approximately 37 minutes' and then accepted the manipulated price (THE carries the 1.05/0.95 band on the oracle table). The bounds are real, numeric and better disclosed than most of this pool, but they are a cross-source sanity check, not a manipulation-proof price.
AAAave
Aave leads Venus 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
by 3 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Venus9/10 out of 10
Aave9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus7/10 out of 10
Aave6/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 2 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 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
Venus14/20Aave14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Venus20.4/30Aave16.6/30
Venus leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Venus2.7/10Aave2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Venus3.2/8Aave3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Venus8.3/18Aave8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Venus unless the term Aave leads on is the one you are buying.
Aave leads Venus 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% (Venus 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% (Venus 9/10, 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% (Venus 7/10, Aave 6/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Venus 9/10, 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
Venus scores 10 points above Aave, led by oracle liquidation price, blast radius, and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Venus 81 (rank 1 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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