Hacken introduced a new framework to assess the security, financial logic and systemic risks of crypto yield products, giving investors a verifiable measure of sustainability in volatile markets.
Summary
- Hacken launched the Yield Risk Score, a standardized metric for assessing crypto yield products.
- The framework evaluates protocols in terms of technical security, financial logic and dependency risks.
According to a press release shared with crypto.news on November 10, Hacken has introduced a new framework designed to evaluate the risk profile of crypto yield products. The Yield Risk Score, or YRS, assesses three dimensions: technical safety, financial sustainability and system dependencies.
The initiative follows the Hacken Trust Summit 2025 in New York, which brought together leaders from Nasdaq, Moody’s, S&P Global, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and A100x to discuss the convergence of digital assets and traditional finance.
Hacking positions the YRS as the first standardized metric for investors to measure the security and stability of return-generating crypto protocols in a market still prone to high-profile failures.
How Hacken’s YRS Addresses a $49 Billion Blind Spot
Hacken’s push for this new benchmark is a response to what the company calls a systemic failure that has cost investors billions. According to our own research, yield providers are the main point of failure in the crypto ecosystem, accounting for as much as 55% of all losses in the sector.
Their data shows that 330 different return protocols have collectively evaporated $49 billion over the past five years, a trend underlined by the recent $93 million collapse of Stream Finance.
“Hacken’s Yield Audit introduces a new layer of trust – one that retail investors can rely on to make informed decisions and that institutional investors need to meet due diligence standards,” the Hacken team said in the statement.
To build that trust, the Yield Risk Score dissects a project on three crucial fronts. The first phase focuses on security and infrastructure, evaluating custodial solutions, smart contract integrity and operational security to produce a technical risk score.
The second phase delves deeper into financial sustainability, stress-testing economic logic and revenue sources to generate a financial sustainability score. Finally, the framework examines dependency and systemic risk, assessing vulnerabilities of oracles, cross-chain bridges, and custodians to generate a dependency risk score.
These three metrics are combined into one comprehensive YRS, reported on a well-known D-to-AAA scale. In addition to the score, Hacken offers continuous monitoring through its Extractor platform, allowing projects to maintain transparency without disclosing proprietary strategies.
Hacken’s work builds on a track record of setting standards that protect the broader crypto ecosystem. After the collapse of FTX, the company pioneered Evidence of reserves audits for exchanges, a practice now adopted by more than 50 platforms to verify holdings on the chain.
