Hakken introduces a new framework for assessing security, financial logic, and systemic risk across crypto yield products, providing investors with a verifiable measure of sustainability in volatile markets.
summary
- Hakken has launched Yield Risk Score, a standardized metric for evaluating crypto yield products.
- This framework evaluates protocols across technical security, financial logic, and dependency risk.
According to a press release shared with crypto.news on November 10, Hacken has introduced a new framework designed to assess the risk profile of crypto yield products. The Yield Risk Score (YRS) evaluates three aspects: technical safety, financial sustainability, and system dependence.
The initiative follows the Hacken Trust Summit 2025 in New York, where leaders from Nasdaq, Moody’s, S&P Global, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and A100x gathered to discuss the convergence of digital assets and traditional finance.
Hacken positions YRS as the first standardized metric that allows investors to assess the safety and stability of yield-producing crypto protocols in a market that remains prone to high-profile failures.
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How Hacken’s YRS addresses $49 billion blind spot
Hakken is promoting the new metric in response to what it calls a systemic failure that has cost investors billions of dollars. According to our own research, yield providers are the single most significant point of failure in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, accounting for a staggering 55% of losses across the industry.
Their data shows that 330 different yield protocols have evaporated a total of $49 billion over the past five years, a trend highlighted by the recent $93 million collapse of Stream Finance.
“Hakken’s Yield Audit introduces a new layer of trust that individual investors can rely on to make informed decisions, and a layer that requires institutional investors to meet due diligence standards,” the Hakken team said in a statement.
To build that confidence, Yield Risk Score analyzes projects across three key dimensions. The first phase focuses on security and infrastructure, evaluating custody solutions, smart contract integrity, and operational security to generate a technical risk score.
The second stage is to drill down into financial sustainability and stress test the economic logic and revenue streams to generate a financial sustainability score. Finally, the framework inspects dependencies and system risks, evaluates vulnerabilities from oracles, cross-chain bridges, and custodians and outputs a dependency risk score.
These three indicators are combined into a single comprehensive YRS and reported on the familiar D to AAA scale. Beyond scores, Hacken provides continuous monitoring through the Extractor platform, allowing projects to maintain transparency without exposing their proprietary strategies.
Hacken’s efforts build on its track record of setting standards that protect the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. After the collapse of FTX, the company pioneered Proof of Reserves auditing for exchanges, and is now used by over 50 platforms to verify on-chain holdings.
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