Venus scores 7 points above Compound, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Venus ranks #1 and Compound #6 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
VEVenus81
vs
Compound74
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #6 of 8
Venus scores 7 points above Compound, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record.
VEVenus #1 of 881
Compound #6 of 874
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 2 of 4 published criteria; Compound on 0. The terms sum to the gap.
TermVenusCompoundWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price9/106/107.7+6.0for Venus+3.1 of 32
Shortfall record9/108/104.8+1.2for Venus+0.6 of 32
Net of the terms+7.2
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.2
Reproduced gap+7.0
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.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.
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactVenusCompound
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.Compound 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.
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 Compound'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.
Compound
74#6 of 8
Pick it when
Compound 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
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.
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 Compound (weight 32)
Shortfall record: 9/10 against 8/10 for Compound (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.
Compound
Compound 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.
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.
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
Compound6/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Venus9/10 out of 10
Compound9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Venus7/10 out of 10
Compound7/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 1 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Compound8/10 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
Venus14/20Compound14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Venus20.4/30Compound17.7/30
Venus leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Venus2.7/10Compound2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Venus3.2/8Compound3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Venus8.3/18Compound8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Venus unless the term Compound leads on is the one you are buying.
Compound 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, Compound 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, Compound 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, Compound 7/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Venus 9/10, Compound 8/10)
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 7 points above Compound, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Venus 81 (rank 1 of 8 lending & borrowing), Compound 74 (rank 6 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.
Answer a few quick questions and get one clear recommendation based on how you actually plan to use crypto — with rationale, tradeoffs, and a path to monitor the decision.
No signup·Free first pass · Private·No spam · No account
Not financial advice · Independent · Always do your own research
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
Compound #6 of 874