RIADeFi
Refusal file · other

Why Ketju rejected Valos

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 Superseded versions are recorded, never edited away.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 ON ACCESS AND UNDISCLOSED LEGAL STRUCTURE. Valos is an actively-managed institutional private-credit manager, not a passive treasury-bill product: allocators deposit Agora's AUSD stablecoin into an "Institutional Credit Vault" (built on Accountable's Vault-as-a-Service infrastructure) that Valos deploys into off-chain-sourced loans to market makers, prime brokers, exchanges, and custodians. Valos states its services are "available only to professional clients," excluding retail explicitly. Independent of that access bar, this review could not confirm Valos's exact legal entity name, licensing status, or governing jurisdiction beyond a Helsinki headquarters reference, nor locate any third-party smart-contract audit of the vault or of Accountable's underlying infrastructure. A third-party vault tracker rates the product's protocol technical risk "Severe" while simultaneously showing a suspiciously smooth return series (zero drawdown against a 7.4% lifetime APY) for a private-credit book whose NAV marks are self-reported, absent independent audit beyond a continuous-attestation system Valos's own vendor operates.

What would reopen the file

  • A US-eligible offering opens to this registry's target client population
  • Valos's exact legal entity name, licensing status, and governing jurisdiction are disclosed
  • An independent, primary-source smart-contract audit of the vault and Accountable's underlying infrastructure is published
  • NAV marks are verified against an independent periodic audit rather than solely a vendor-run continuous-attestation system

Facts on file

Verdict
Rejected
Exposure
other
Chains examined
Monad
Memo version
v1
Reviewed
Next review

← All published refusals