Fallback behavior on oracle failure
A oracle & external dependencies factor in the v1.7.0 rubric. Measured per protocol on a s cadence.
Methodology how we score#
What this measures
This factor documents what the protocol does when its primary oracle reverts, returns stale data, or becomes unavailable — specifically whether it pauses, switches to a secondary source, uses a last-known-price cache, or reverts all affected transactions. The assessment is based on protocol documentation and source code inspection of fallback logic.
Why it matters
Oracle failure is not purely an adversarial event; Chainlink feeds have experienced latency during periods of extreme network congestion, and aggregators have returned stale prices during market dislocations. A protocol with no defined fallback behaviour may either freeze all operations (starving users of liquidity) or, worse, silently continue operating on stale prices — enabling economic exploitation without an active attacker. The T-02 gap analysis identified fallback behaviour documentation as one of the most consistently absent fields across competitor risk platforms, making this a direct differentiator for the dashboard.
Green / Yellow / Red
Green is scored when the protocol has a documented and code-verified fallback: either a pause mechanism that halts borrowing/liquidations or a secondary source that is automatically queried on primary failure. Yellow is scored when a fallback is mentioned in documentation but not verifiable in deployed source code, or when the fallback is a last-known-price cache with no maximum age. Red is scored when the protocol has no fallback documented or implemented and will operate on whatever the primary oracle returns, including stale or zero values.
Common gray cases
Gray is applied when the fallback path involves off-chain keepers or multi-sig emergency oracle updates that have no on-chain proof of mechanism.
Notable historical examples
No cross-hacked incidents are currently linked in the database for this factor.
Measurement what to look for#
Identify the declared fallback behavior (pause, secondary source, last-known-price, revert) when the primary oracle reverts or reports a stale value.