Overview
Xerberus is a risk rating service that grades DeFi vaults on three things: safety of the code, soundness of the economics, and quality of the people running it1. Investors pay for the work, not the protocols being rated, so the scores answer to readers rather than to the projects being graded1.
Xerberus is built around Cardano and covers vaults on both Cardano and Ethereum. A vault is the automated rulebook (smart contract) that takes in your crypto, puts it to work earning yield, and hands back the proceeds. The methodology is published in full2, a free interface lets builders pull the data into their own tools3, and Xerberus sits on the Cardano Treasury Oversight Committee that double-checks how community-approved Treasury funds get released4.
Key Features
- See where the risk actually sits. Each vault gets a separate rating for security (does the code hold up), economics (does the yield come from real activity), and governance (who is in control)1. Single-number ratings hide where danger actually lives, so the breakdown points you to the part that matters.
- Every weakness traces to a real past failure. Each subscore is anchored to an event that has actually happened, like the Terra/Luna collapse, the Euler hack, Mango Markets, or FTX contagion1. A low score is not theoretical and points to a specific failure pattern that has cost people money before.
- Investors pay, not the protocols. Xerberus refuses payment from the protocols it rates and is funded by the investors who rely on the scores1. This removes the conflict of interest that has long shadowed traditional credit ratings.
- Open methodology, open math. The full scoring framework lives on a public site anyone can read, including the design rules and the trade-offs the team made2. There are no hidden algorithms, so readers can audit how a score was produced.
- Free risk data for builders. A public interface exposes the same ratings shown in the app, so wallets and dashboards can warn users about a risky token before they buy or stake into it3.
What to Expect
If you are an investor looking at a DeFi vault, the Xerberus app at app.xerberus.io lists rated vaults across Cardano and Ethereum, each one expandable into a full report card with security, economics, and governance scores1. The rating service is live at app.xerberus.io; the planned Xerberus partner chain that the XER token secures is still in development.
If you build a product and want the same data inside your own app, the GitBook documentation walks you through requesting a free key and calling a public endpoint that returns the rating for any covered token3. There is no paywall.
If you want to dig deeper into how the scores work, the methodology site is a navigable set of design notes, scoring rules, and known limitations2. Project Catalyst supporters can also follow Xerberus's track record across five funded proposals in Funds 11, 12, and 13, including an integration with the Orcfax outside price feed service5.
The XER token is a separate workstream from the rating product. It is a Cardano-native token designed to secure a planned Xerberus partner chain, a sovereign network that would run rating computations on dedicated infrastructure rather than relying on a central server. Trading happens primarily on Minswap.
