S&P Global Launches Risk Ratings for $10B Crypto Vault Market Amid $6M Base Exploit

Deposits in crypto lending vaults surged from $1.5B to approximately $10B over the past 2 years, prompting S&P Global to introduce a standardized risk framework for the sector. On the exact day of the framework's launch, security firm CertiK flagged a $6M suspicious withdrawal involving a newly deployed proxy on a Base network vault. The Base incident did not exploit the underlying Aave protocol, highlighting how investors face severe secondary risks from vault curators, smart-contract permissions, and liquidity mismatches. S&P's grading system issues a "(v)" suffix to denote relative impairment risk rather than standard credit ratings, explicitly avoiding any guarantees on yield or capital recovery.