According to a message relayed by Bitcoin.com News, over 100 tokens have now received ratings ranging from AAA to CCC. The system is called Universal Token Ratings (UTR), and the two companies explain that the ratings are not static. UTR is regularly updated, and Defillama and Forgd note that "a project’s rating can deteriorate almost in real-time if its market structure fails, even if the disclosed information remains the same."
Looking at the UTR dashboard, the DeFi crypto-asset Uniswap (UNI) is the leader with the only AAA rating. Meteora (MET), Curve DAO (CRV), Raydium (RAY), Olexchange (O), jito (JTO), ether.fi (ETHFI), dogecoin (DOGE), zama (ZAMA), and pyth network (PYTH) have an AA rating. The dashboard also displays other performance metrics and market capitalization. As of Wednesday, August 26, 2026, the UTR rating by Defillama includes 128 unique assets.
"Defillama’s mission has always been to provide honest and unbiased data," explained Ryan Selai, Head of Research at Defillama. "Ratings, calculated based on real-time market data, are a natural extension of this mission and give our users a quick, standardized way to identify promising projects."
From Moody’s to Crypto: A Century-Old Rating Model Gets a New Life
UTR resembles what rating agencies such as Moody’s Ratings, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), and Fitch Ratings have used for decades to assess default risk. Moody’s began applying this methodology to bonds in 1909, Fitch joined the effort several years later in 1924, and S&P followed in Fitch’s footsteps around the same time. An "AAA" rating is considered the highest credit quality, while ratings of "CCC" and below are often referred to as "junk."
Moody’s and S&P are also participating in the digital asset industry, implementing their own assessment systems. Moody’s has a dedicated stablecoin rating methodology, and S&P uses a 1-to-5 stablecoin stability assessment scale to measure the creditworthiness and risks associated with specific stablecoin assets. The new UTR rating from Forgd and Defillama aims to be "the first rating standard in the digital asset space that continuously verifies whether a token project’s real-market performance matches its public disclosures."
Forgd Says Token Ratings Must Be Earned, Not Just Received
"There have been transparency checklists in crypto, but the industry has never had a continuously updated rating system," stated Shane Molidor, Founder and CEO of Forgd, during the announcement. "Our rating shows whether the market is functioning correctly at a given moment. The Universal Token Ratings system is designed so that the rating must be continuously earned."
Defillama and Forgd Bet That Ratings Can Bolster Institutional Investor Trust
The companies note that the project's launch comes at a time when institutional investor awareness of crypto assets, blockchains, and applications has peaked. Defillama and Forgd believe that an industry standard, similar to bond ratings, should help build trust and increase accountability. The teams also noted that recently launched coins from token generation events (TGEs) are "pre-rated" from the outset.
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