RIADeFi
Refusal file · stable lending

Why Ketju rejected Frax (frxUSD / sfrxUSD)

Memo v1Published by Ketju Research

A registry memo, published verbatim and versioned. Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away. A rejection is a judgment for Ketju's client base and thesis, not a universal safety claim. Not investment, legal, tax, or compliance advice.

The memo

REJECTED FOR BOTH SYMBOLS, though the two do not fail for the same reason and one is more reopenable than the other. The prior thesis was factually wrong: current Frax materials do not identify Maple, Ondo or Mountain as frxUSD reserves. Frax says the present backing consists of BlackRock BUIDL and Superstate USTB, while its documentation permits a wider set of cash-equivalent custodian assets and delegates reserve composition to Frax Inc. The more important error was treating frxUSD and sfrxUSD as one risk. frxUSD is a fully collateralized stablecoin redeemable against available enshrined-custodian assets. sfrxUSD is a managed yield vault whose Benchmark Yield Strategy may rotate all staked frxUSD among Ethena carry trades, DeFi AMOs and Treasury/IORB strategies. That is not Treasury exposure and can import venues this registry rejects — sfrxUSD is rejected on that design fact and stays rejected absent a hard mandate exclusion of those venues, a standing condition rather than a temporary evidence gap. frxUSD is different: Frax publishes the permitted designs and current headline backing, but this review could not reproduce a dated, line-by-line reserve report with custodian values and encumbrances — no single Frax-published document gives that, and a Chaos Labs review confirms directly that "no comprehensive unified attestation covering all frxUSD reserves" exists. This registry has no per-symbol verdict field, so a single entry covering both symbols cannot record "reject sfrxUSD, hold frxUSD to a materially higher bar than most tokenized-RWA approvals get" without either overstating frxUSD or understating sfrxUSD; a `project` id split was considered and rejected because `project` is the exact join key against the live DefiLlama feed; a fabricated `frax-frxusd` slug would silently never match live pool data. Rejecting the whole entry is therefore the honest position: unproven is not approved. frxUSD alone has a real path back once the schema supports a per-symbol verdict, or once a reproducible reserve report exists and is checked against a standalone entry built for it.

What would reopen the file

  • Any reserve asset outside cash, insured deposits, short government securities, or approved tokenized Treasury funds
  • Reserve composition or sfrxUSD allocation not reproducible from dated public reporting
  • frxUSD backing below 100% or a custodian redemption failure
  • Any sfrxUSD allocation to an unapproved carry, lending, liquidity or private-credit strategy
  • Proposed-size frxUSD or sfrxUSD exit exceeding the written cost or timing limit

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
stable lending
Chains examined
Ethereum, Fraxtal
Instruments
FRXUSD, SFRXUSD
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

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