DeFi Protocol Risk Score Calculator

A single admin key is a textbook single point of failure — if that one key is compromised, lost, or misused, the protocol's admin functions are fully exposed with no other signer to check it, which is why this calculator scores it at only 2 of 10 possible points. Zero admin keys (a fully immutable, decentralized protocol) scores highest at 10 points, and a multisig with several signers scores progressively higher as signer count rises, since compromising or colluding among multiple independent keyholders is harder than compromising one.

TVL Score is log-scaled (points come from the base-10 logarithm of TVL in millions), which means the score gain from $10M to $100M TVL is roughly the same as from $100M to $1B — each 10x jump in TVL adds a similar chunk of score, rather than the score rising in a straight line with dollars. This reflects diminishing marginal trust signal: going from $1M to $10M TVL says a lot more about market confidence than going from $900M to $909M.

Chain Penalty subtracts 2 points from the raw score for every chain beyond the first the protocol is deployed on, reflecting that each additional chain typically requires a bridge or cross-chain messaging layer — historically one of the most exploited attack surfaces in DeFi. A protocol on a single chain incurs no penalty; a protocol spread across five chains loses 8 points to this factor alone, independent of how secure any single chain's deployment is.

Suggested Max Allocation is a tiered guideline derived directly from the composite Safety Score — 25% at a score of 80 or above, stepping down to 15%, 5%, 2%, and 0% as the score falls through lower risk tiers. It's a rough portfolio-sizing heuristic for how much of a crypto portfolio might reasonably be exposed to a single protocol at that risk level, not personalized investment advice, and it does not account for your own risk tolerance, diversification needs, or the specific nature of any given protocol's risk beyond this calculator's nine input dimensions.