Every Monday, Litmus grades every live pool on the feed and publishes the record - before anyone knows how those pools actually play out. This week's snapshot covers 5,300 pools. Here's what changed between July 13 and July 20.
The week at a glance
- 5,300 pools graded - up 43 from last week
- 567 pools upgraded, 447 downgraded - a net-positive week
- Safe share (A or B): 61%, flat week over week - but the mix underneath moved a lot
Grade distribution
| Grade | Last week | This week | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| A - Very safe | 112 | 112 | +0 |
| B - Safe | 3,094 | 3,138 | +44 |
| C - Moderate | 1,340 | 1,383 | +43 |
| D - Elevated | 423 | 403 | −20 |
| F - High risk | 288 | 264 | −24 |
The headline safe-share held at 61%, but notice the tails: D and F both shrank (−20 and −24) while B and C grew. Fewer pools sat in the danger zone this week - the middle of the market quietly firmed up.
Does the grade actually mean anything?
Fair question to ask of any rating. Here's every graded pool's APY, grouped by the grade we gave it:
The separation is clean and it runs in one direction: median APY climbs from 3.2% at A to 46.7% at F. We don't grade on yield - the score comes from liquidity, APY stability, reward quality, and data completeness - so this gap is the grade independently rediscovering the oldest rule in finance: the biggest advertised returns carry the biggest risk.
One honest wrinkle: A's median (3.2%) sits slightly above B's (1.4%). That's not a bug - the A tier is dominated by large, mature staking and lending pools that pay a real base yield, while B sweeps in thousands of small pools paying close to nothing. Safety and zero yield aren't the same thing.
Notable moves
The pattern in the downgrades is impossible to miss: almost every hard fall from B to F was a high-APY meme-token pair.
- Raydium WSOL-ZEREBRO (Solana) - 88.20% APY → B to F
- gmtrade USDCAD-USDC (Solana) - 44.47% APY → B to F
- Uniswap NES-USDC (Ethereum) - 38.73% APY → B to F
- Uniswap ETH-TRAC (Ethereum) - 29.56% APY → B to F
Headline yields like these come almost entirely from short-lived incentives and volatile trading fees. When that volatility shows up in the data, the grade drops fast. That's the grade doing exactly its job: a big APY number never hides high risk for long.
On the other side, the biggest upgrade was Aave v3 USDTB (Ethereum), moving F to B at a modest 5.80% APY - a blue-chip lending market stabilizing after a rough patch. Quiet, boring, and exactly the kind of recovery the grade is built to catch.
Where the money moved
The biggest TVL swings this week (pools over $1M) tell the other half of the story - capital didn't chase the 88% meme yields, it concentrated in graded-safe stablecoin vaults:
- Kamino USDG (Solana) - $2.0M → $23.0M (+1,033%), graded B
- SparkLend USDT (Ethereum) - $15.7M → $73.7M (+369%), graded B
- Aave v3 USDTB (Ethereum) - $1.6M → $5.9M (+259%), graded B
- Morpho Blue cscbUSDC (Base) - $2.8M → $10.1M (+258%), graded B
Every one of the week's biggest inflows landed in a B-graded pool. Money moved toward safety, not yield.
By chain
Safe share is the percentage of a chain's graded pools sitting at A or B.
| Chain | Pools | Safe share | Δ vs last week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | 2,074 | 61% | +1pp |
| Solana | 778 | 78% | +2pp |
| Base | 601 | 43% | −2pp |
| Arbitrum | 322 | 60% | +1pp |
| BSC | 149 | 73% | +0pp |
| Polygon | 137 | 47% | −3pp |
Two things stand out. Solana is the safest major chain this week at 78% - despite being where most of the meme-pair blowups happened, its stablecoin and LST pools carry the average. And Base keeps slipping - down another 2 points to 43%, the lowest safe-share of any major chain. Base has the yield, but a smaller share of it clears our safety bar.
Our read
This was a flight-to-safety week wearing a calm face. The 61% safe-share didn't move, so at a glance nothing happened - but underneath, the market sorted itself: the high-APY degen pairs got purged down to F, the D/F tails shrank, and every dollar of major new TVL went into boring B-graded stablecoin vaults. That's a healthier market than the flat headline suggests.
What I'm watching next week: whether the newly-upgraded B pools hold their grade. A pool that bounces F → B → F is telling you something the APY number won't. And whether Base can arrest its slide - three straight down-weeks in safe-share is a trend, not noise.
Method note
Grades are recomputed every week from public data under our published methodology and recorded before outcomes are known. They are descriptive research and our opinion - not investment advice, not an audit, and not a guarantee. Always verify with the underlying protocol before depositing.