Bluechip Partners With Hacken to Score Technical Risk in Stablecoin Ratings

Bluechip is partnering with Hacken to integrate technical risk scoring into our stablecoin ratings. Hacken's methodology will power the I in SMIDGE: Implementation. Updated ratings will roll out gradually across all covered stablecoins over the next few months.

With this partnership, Bluechip is the first stablecoin rating agency to cover technical risk in an extensive manner as a full factor.

What is Technical Risk?

Stablecoins can be fully backed and still depeg. Adequate reserves of high quality assets are necessary, but far from sufficient to build a safe stablecoin. Additional measures must be taken to prevent internal and external actors from pillaging those reserves.

This includes technical safety measures to stop malicious attackers from draining the smart contracts, minting unbacked supply, exploiting a stale oracle price, or leveraging any such weakness. The system that issues, redeems, and accounts for the stablecoins needs to hold up well under pressure to prevent a depeg. This is technical risk.

SMIDGE: Implementation

The SMIDGE framework organizes stablecoin safety into six factors:

• Stability evaluates the quality and storage of reserves, segregation of assets, and the core stability mechanism. It asks whether reserves are safe, liquid, and ring-fenced from the issuer.
• Management evaluates the track record of key personnel, and the ability of token holders to hold them accountable. Identified teams in strong legal jurisdictions are crucial.
• Implementation evaluates smart contract quality, oracle and bridge risks, and off-chain infrastructure. Audit depth, upgradeability, and admin key control all matter here.
• Decentralization evaluates censorship risk, capacity to blacklist users, decision making process, and distribution of voting power. It asks who can freeze balances, and on whose instruction.
• External evaluates signals from prediction markets and perpetual futures, and social sentiment of users. Market pricing acts as an independent check on our own analysis.

Implementation is the factor that captures technical risk. This is now scored through a dedicated methodology developed by Hacken.

Hacken: Blockchain Security & Compliance

Hacken is an end-to-end blockchain security and compliance partner for digital asset issuers. The firm combines deep onchain expertise with enterprise-grade quality, AI-powered offensive security, and globally recognized certifications.

Hacken's methodology for technical risk covers smart contract reliability, supply integrity, operational security, oracle & bridge security, and off-chain infrastructure. 

Stablecoins are assigned to one of four classes based on their onchain footprint. The criteria stay the same across all four classes. Only the weights move, adjusted to the stablecoin's core mechanism. All inputs are publicly verifiable with onchain data, published security assessments, or verifiable certifications.

The Bluechip View

Institutional users can now assess technical risk on the same page and under the same rating as risks arising from reserve quality, external oversight, and team background.

Reserve quality remains the single largest driver of stablecoin safety, and nothing in our new methodology changes that. What changes is that a stablecoin can no longer earn a strong Bluechip rating on reserves alone, while the code behind those reserves goes unexamined.

Updated ratings will roll out gradually across all covered stablecoins over the next few months.

Read more:

• Browse current ratings: Stablecoin Ratings
• Press and media inquiries: Contact Bluechip