Venus scores 1 point above Spark, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Venus ranks #1 and Spark #2 of 8 published lending & borrowing. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.
VEVenus81
vs
Spark80
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #1 and #2 of 8
Venus scores 1 point above Spark, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record.
VEVenus #1 of 881
Spark #2 of 880
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; Spark on 2. The terms sum to the gap.
TermVenusSparkWeightPoints
Oracle liquidation price9/108/107.7+2.0for Venus+1.0 of 32
Blast radius7/108/105.8−1.5for Spark−0.8 of 32
Rate authorship9/1010/105.8−1.5for Spark−0.8 of 32
Shortfall record9/107/104.8+2.5for Venus+1.3 of 32
Net of the terms+1.5
Criteria roundingThe criteria block is rounded to whole points before it is spread−0.2
Reproduced gap+1.3
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below8180+1.0
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.SparkScore 80SparkLend is an Ethereum-only Aave v3 fork run as Sky's in-house money market: prices come from a three-oracle median of RedStone, Chainlink and Chronicle with a Uniswap TWAP as last resort, your deposit is never re-routed by a curator, and the borrow rate is an immutable per-reserve IRM — SSR-anchored on the stablecoin reserves — that Sky governance can only change by redeploying the contract.Strength: Rate authorship — 10/10Watch-out: Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).
Quick facts
At a glance
3 of 4 rows read the same for both.
FactVenusSpark
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.SparkLend's stablecoin reserves price off the Sky Savings Rate (SSR) plus a fixed spread up to the kink, and suppliers receive the borrow interest less a 10% reserve factor; there is no deposit or curator fee. The 10 September 2026 spell proposal (https://forum.skyeco.com/t/september-10-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/28208, posted 31 August 2026, fetched 28 September 2026) reads the rate on-chain at Ethereum block 25,861,675 (29 August 2026): "getVariableRateSlope1() returns 3.9594644783474038423088%, which equals the SSR of 3.4594644783474038423088% plus the 0.50% spread exactly." For USDT, the largest reserve, it cuts that spread "from 0.005e27 (+0.50%) to 0.001e27 (+0.10%)" and states the effect: "The borrow rate at the kink falls from 3.9595% to 3.5595%" and "At 95% utilisation and a 10% reserve factor that is a supply rate of about 3.04%"; at the time of posting "The live borrow rate is 3.4824% and the live supply rate 2.6186%." The same post gives the other stablecoin curves: "USDC runs a 98% kink with a +1.00% spread". These are SSR-linked and move with every SSR change and with utilisation; they are not a fixed price. The 2 July 2026 SSR figure this note previously carried is superseded.
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 Spark's 8/10 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.
Spark
80#2 of 8
Pick it when
Pick Spark if blast radius matters most — it scores 8/10 to Venus's 7/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Rate authorship — 10/10
Tradeoff
Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).
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 8/10 for Spark (weight 32)
Shortfall record: 9/10 against 7/10 for Spark (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.
Spark
Choose Spark if rate authorship matters most
Rate authorship: 10/10 against 9/10 for Venus (weight 24)
Blast radius: 8/10 against 7/10 for Venus (weight 24)
SparkScore 80SparkLend is an Ethereum-only Aave v3 fork run as Sky's in-house money market: prices come from a three-oracle median of RedStone, Chainlink and Chronicle with a Uniswap TWAP as last resort, your deposit is never re-routed by a curator, and the borrow rate is an immutable per-reserve IRM — SSR-anchored on the stablecoin reserves — that Sky governance can only change by redeploying the contract.Strength: Rate authorship — 10/10Watch-out: Read the oracle-type field on your collateral in the app before you post it, and read the liquidity line before you supply. SparkLend does not price every asset at market: 'stablecoins such as USDS and DAI use a fixed price of 1.00 USD, which does not deviate even if the asset's market price moves away from this value' (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend/guides/oracles). If you post USDS or DAI as collateral, a real-world depeg will not move your health factor at all — and the peg-ratio killswitch that exists for exactly this failure covers only 'wstETH, rETH, weETH, cbBTC, WBTC, LBTC', not the fixed-price stablecoins (https://docs.spark.fi/products/sparklend). USDS is issued by Sky, whose governance both sets that $1.00 constant and authors your borrow rate, so the protection and the exposure share a controller. Second, the USDC supply rate you are being shown was deliberately engineered by thinning the withdrawal buffer, and Spark's own risk body said so before the vote: 'At 98% utilization, only about 2% of supplied USDC is immediately available before new deposits, repayments, liquidations, or other liquidity sources are needed. Withdrawals become more fragile', and 'The proposal improves the displayed supply rate by accepting a thinner liquidity buffer' (Spark Risk Council, 2026-06-22, https://forum.skyeco.com/t/july-2-2026-proposed-changes-to-spark-for-upcoming-spell/27982).
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 1 of 10weight 7.7 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Spark8/10 out of 10
Rate authorship
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Spark leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Spark10/10 out of 10
Blast radius
by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86Spark leads
Venus7/10 out of 10
Spark8/10 out of 10
Shortfall record
by 2 of 10weight 4.8 of 86Venus leads
Venus9/10 out of 10
Spark7/10 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
Venus14/20Spark14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
Venus20.4/30Spark19.9/30
Venus leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
Venus2.7/10Spark2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
Venus3.2/8Spark3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
Venus8.3/18Spark8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order
Choose Venus unless the term Spark leads on is the one you are buying.
Pick Spark if blast radius matters most — it scores 8/10 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
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, Spark 10/10)
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, Spark 8/10)
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, Spark 8/10)
Scored by Has it lost lender money before, and did it publish it? · 20% (Venus 9/10, Spark 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 1 point above Spark, led by oracle liquidation price and shortfall record. Published scores, out of 100: Venus 81 (rank 1 of 8 lending & borrowing), Spark 80 (rank 2 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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