RIADeFi
Refusal file · other

Why Ketju rejected 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 Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away.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, DESPITE REAL STRUCTURAL IMPROVEMENTS, ON A RECENT REALIZED EXPLOIT. SolvBTC is a tiered Bitcoin reserve token, not a single-custodian wrapper: a Core Reserve of native BTC plus BTCB and cbBTC backs most of the token, while a capped, rate-limited Innovative Reserve holds already-rejected wrapped assets including WBTC and FBTC. Solv has made genuine governance progress — a FROST-based multi-party signing upgrade completed in early 2026, continuous audits from three named firms, and Chainlink Proof of Reserves — more independent verification than most entries in this bridge batch. But in March 2026 a reentrancy bug in a related vault let an attacker mint far beyond the intended supply and extract about $2.7M; Solv pledged to cover the loss but the funds were not confirmed returned. Combined with a stated multi-day to two-week redemption window, this is a realized smart-contract failure five months before this review, not a hypothetical one, and it does not clear the bar for approval even with the strongest governance in this batch.

What would reopen the file

  • Twelve consecutive months with no smart-contract exploit following the March 2026 BitcoinReserveOffering incident, with an independent post-mortem and remediation audit published
  • A proposed-size redemption is demonstrated to complete within a documented, tested maximum window under stress conditions
  • Innovative Reserve composition and its caps are independently verifiable on-chain, not self-reported
  • The FROST multisig signer set and threshold are fully disclosed and confirmed operative

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
other
Chains examined
Ethereum
Instruments
SOLVBTC
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

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