# Curation risk

> How vault curators and the markets they run are scored - AUM tier, identity verification, role and reputation.

Source: https://docs.1delta.io/risk/curators/

---

On isolated-market protocols the protocol does not choose which collateral is
acceptable or at what LLTV — a **curator** does. The curator picks the markets, sets
the caps and can re-point a vault's allocation. Their judgement is the risk.

There is no objective measure of judgement, so curation is scored on proxies that
are at least verifiable: how much capital has been entrusted to them, whether
their identity is attested, and how the role was granted.

---

## Curator score

Both supported curator registries produce a 1-5 score, lower is better.

**Assets under management** sets the base tier. It is the market's own verdict:
capital is the one signal that cannot be self-declared.

| AUM | Tier |
| --- | --- |
| $100M or more | 1 |
| $10M or more | 2 |
| $1M or more | 3 |
| $100k or more | 4 |
| below $100k, or unknown | 5 |

**Adjustments**, added to the tier and clamped to 1-5:

| Registry | Adjustment |
| --- | --- |
| Morpho | +2 when the curator is not verified |
| Euler | +1 when the curator has no registry name, +1 when the address holds the vault only as `owner` rather than an explicit on-chain curator role |

Euler's registry has no verification flag, so an entity-registry name stands in
for it — and only a registry name counts. A name inferred from a vault title or
an explorer tag is a display label, not an identity attestation, and does not earn
the bonus.

The two adjustments are different sizes because the registries differ: Morpho's
`verified` is an explicit attestation whose absence is meaningful, while Euler's
missing name is more often incomplete coverage than a red flag.

---

## Reputation allowlist

An allowlist of established professional risk managers caps a matched curator at
score 2. It is matched case-insensitively against the curator name, substring
aware.

This exists because AUM is a lagging indicator: a well-known risk manager
launching a new vault starts at zero AUM and would otherwise score 5 on their
first day. It only ever *improves* a score, never worsens one, and it is a
curated list with a stated purpose rather than a scoring input anyone can game.

---

## Market-level curation

For a curated market, the number of curators is itself a signal:

| Curators on the market | Level |
| --- | --- |
| 2 or more | green |
| exactly 1 | yellow |
| none | red |

The market's curator score is the allocation-weighted average of its curators'
scores where allocations are known, otherwise an equal-weight average. A market
with no curator at all scores 5 at the protocol level; when it appears inside a
vault it is capped at 3, because unvetted is not the same as proven bad.

The curator score is then combined worst-of with the market's bad-debt rating —
see [Bad debt](https://docs.1delta.io/risk/bad-debt/). Observed loss beats predicted quality: a market
with two blue-chip curators and 70% bad debt is rated on the bad debt.

---

## Limits of this dimension

- AUM measures trust already given, which is partly reflexive.
- Verification confirms identity, not competence.
- A curator repeatedly associated with bad-debt markets is not yet penalised on
  their own score; the penalty lands on the affected markets and on any vault
  holding them.
- Curator identity on some protocols resolves to an address with no name at all.
  Those are scored on AUM and role, flagged as unrecognised, and capped at yellow
  in vault ratings rather than assumed bad.