Venus scores 3 points above Morpho, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Venus ranks #1 and Morpho #3 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
VEVenus81
vs
Morpho78
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #3 of 8
Venus scores 3 points above Morpho, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record.
VEVenus #1 of 881
Morpho #3 of 878
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; Morpho on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermVenusMorphoWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price9/107/107.7+4.0for Venus+2.0 of 32
Blast radius7/109/105.8−3.0for Morpho−1.5 of 32
Shortfall record9/107/104.8+2.5for Venus+1.3 of 32
Net of the terms+3.5
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.1
Reproduced gap+3.4
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below8178+3.0
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.MorphoScore 78A permissionless isolated-market primitive deployed on 14 chains where the oracle, the interest-rate model and the liquidation LLTV are chosen once at market creation and can never be changed — so Morpho publishes no deviation threshold and no heartbeat anywhere, but does publish, per market and continuously, the exact oracle contract that liquidates you, a documented degraded-state regime for when that oracle reverts, and the exact dollar figure of bad debt sitting in each market.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactVenusMorpho
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.A Morpho depositor's cost is the vault curator's fee. The Vault V2 page (https://docs.morpho.org/learn/concepts/vault-v2/, fetched 28 September 2026) caps it: "Supports both a performance fee (up to 50% on yield) and a management fee (up to 5% on total assets)." Live values are API fields, not page text: https://api.morpho.org/graphql on 28 September 2026 returned performanceFee 0 and managementFee 0.009999999973584 on Paypal USD Main, 0.1 and 0 on Sentora RLUSD Main, and 0.15 and 0 on Sentora PRIME Main - three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s. On all three the setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee timelocks read 0 seconds, so the curator can change the fee without notice. Supply rates float with each market's AdaptiveCurveIRM, so no fixed 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 Morpho's 7/10 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.
Morpho
78#3 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Morpho if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Venus's 7/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Rate authorship — 9/10
Tradeoff
Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".
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 7/10 for Morpho (weight 32)
Shortfall record: 9/10 against 7/10 for Morpho (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.
Morpho
Choose Morpho if blast radius matters most
Blast radius: 9/10 against 7/10 for Venus (weight 24)
MorphoScore 78A permissionless isolated-market primitive deployed on 14 chains where the oracle, the interest-rate model and the liquidation LLTV are chosen once at market creation and can never be changed — so Morpho publishes no deviation threshold and no heartbeat anywhere, but does publish, per market and continuously, the exact oracle contract that liquidates you, a documented degraded-state regime for when that oracle reverts, and the exact dollar figure of bad debt sitting in each market.Strength: Rate authorship — 9/10Watch-out: Before you supply, run Morpho's own bad-debt query with the listed filter OFF — and note that the filter, not the risk, is what changes. Morpho publishes a per-market outstanding bad-debt figure through https://api.morpho.org/graphql, which is more than most of this category does, but the curated view lies by omission: across the 590 markets Morpho marks listed, outstanding bad debt on 2026-08-17 was $0.00 against $4.42bn of borrows; drop that one flag and the same API at the same moment reports 27 markets carrying $255,015,878.47, every single one of them listed=false — $88.2M in wstUSR/USDC on Ethereum, $86.9M in xUSD/USDC on Arbitrum One, $28.8M in RLP/USDC and $23.0M in sdeUSD/USDC on World Chain, a chain on which Morpho has no listed markets at all. Morpho has published no post-mortem for any of it; its own newsletter for the month those losses formed (https://morpho.org/blog/morpho-effect-november-2025, 01 Dec 2025) does not contain the words 'bad debt', 'loss', 'deficit' or 'incident' once (fourteen such terms were checked, each zero times) and instead reports that "Curators are generating $300,000 in fees per week". The mechanism that produced those numbers is the one you are buying: Morpho does not choose oracles — "Market curators (not Morpho) are responsible for selecting and implementing appropriate oracles for their markets." — and it explicitly supports "Fixed-Price Oracles" that report a constant, so a collateral token can be marked at $1 in the contract while trading at five cents. Morpho documents exactly what happens if that feed REVERTS (borrow and liquidate stop, lenders and repaying borrowers can still exit) at https://docs.morpho.org/curate/concepts/security-considerations, but nothing at all catches a feed that keeps answering with the wrong number, and the kill switch that would is something the same page tells the CURATOR to build. Two smaller things to check before signing: if your vault was minted by the MetaMorpho Factory V1.1 it "do[es] not realize bad debt", so its share price will look clean while a loss sits inside it and the first person out is paid at your expense; and on three of the four largest Ethereum Vault V2s — which share one curator address and one owner address and held ~$1.05bn between them on 2026-09-28 — setPerformanceFee and setManagementFee carry a 0-second timelock, so the 50%-of-yield and 5%-of-assets caps can be reached with no notice at all, whatever the docs say about "a window to exit".
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 2 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Morpho7/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
weight 5.8 of 86Tie
Venus9/10 out of 10
Morpho9/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 2 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Morpho leads
Venus7/10 out of 10
Morpho9/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 2 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Morpho7/10 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
Venus14/20Morpho14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Venus20.4/30Morpho19.1/30
Venus leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Venus2.7/10Morpho2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Venus3.2/8Morpho3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Venus8.3/18Morpho8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Venus unless the term Morpho leads on is the one you are buying.
Pick Morpho if blast radius matters most — it scores 9/10 to Venus's 7/10 there (weight 24).
The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .
From the published order
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If this isn't your case
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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, Morpho 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, Morpho 7/10)
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, Morpho 9/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Venus 9/10, Morpho 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 3 points above Morpho, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Venus 81 (rank 1 of 8 lending & borrowing), Morpho 78 (rank 3 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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Morpho #3 of 878