RIA·DeFi
Refusal file · synthetic yield

Why Ketju rejected Solv Protocol (SolvBTC)

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 Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away.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, though the custody design is better than most. ~$2.8B TVL, custody spread across multiple regulated providers with no single one holding more than 40% of reserves, cold storage, multisig authorisation. That is genuinely more thoughtful than WBTC. The blocker is a March 2026 DOUBLE-MINTING vulnerability in a vault contract, exploited for $2.7M and since fixed. Double-minting is the same failure class as the Kelp bridge exploit that produced $196M of bad debt at Aave four months earlier: unbacked tokens created from nothing. The dollar amount here is small; the class of bug is not, and it happened four months ago in a protocol whose entire premise is that each token is backed 1:1 by real Bitcoin. Compounded by the yield source — SolvBTC pays 3-8% from lending, liquidity provision and staking across multiple chains, which is a bundle of strategies a client cannot inspect. Revisit after a clean 12 months.

What would reopen the file

  • n/a — rejected; revisit 2027-01-31 if no further minting defects

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
synthetic yield
Chains examined
Ethereum, BSC
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

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