[ARFC] VIZI - Building the $105B FICO Standard for DeFi, A Credit Scoring Research Proposal for Aave

Governance
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Summary

This post asks Aave’s risk committee to evaluate VIZI, a 300–850 on-chain credit signal as a supplemental data point for borrower monitoring. No smart contract integration. No governance vote. Just a data relationship as a supplemental off chain signal for borrower creditworthiness monitoring. This is not a proposal for a smart contract integration. VIZI is not yet at the stage where a production protocol integration would be appropriate, and I want to be transparent about that upfront.

Motivation

The FICO Parallel. Why a Standard and Not Just a Tool

Before the FICO Score, banks underwrote every loan manually, required collateral for most credit products, and could only serve borrowers they had a prior relationship with. That is the current state of the DeFI economy today. 1989. The FICO Score created a universal language for creditworthiness, a single number that any lender could trust without knowing the borrower personally.

The result was not just more accurate underwriting. It was an entirely new category of financial product which was unsecured consumer credit at scale. Credit cards, personal loans, auto financing without a cosigner, none of these products exist at scale without a shared credit scoring standard that every lender accepts.

TradFi solved this problem back in 1989. Collectively, Equifax, Experian, TransUnion and Fico are valued at over $105B. Traditional credit scoring industry rests on a data architecture that is slower, less accurate, and less tamper resistant than the blockchain infrastructure that already exists. A blockchain native credit standard does not require a centralized database, does not collect personal information, cannot be breached in the way Equifax was in 2017, and updates in real time rather than in monthly batch cycles.

DeFi is in the pre-FICO moment right now. Every protocol overcollateralizes not because it is the optimal risk structure, but because there is no shared standard for borrower creditworthiness. The market is structurally constrained by the absence of infrastructure that TradFi built 35 years ago.

VIZI is not a better risk tool for Aave. It is an attempt to build the infrastructure layer that makes undercollateralized DeFi lending possible, the same way FICO made unsecured TradFi lending possible. That requires protocols like Aave to engage with the signal early, stress test it against real borrower populations, and help shape what the standard becomes. That is what this proposal is asking for.

Aave’s risk parameters are among the most sophisticated in DeFi. LTV ratios, liquidation thresholds, and borrow caps are calibrated with precision. But every one of those parameters is calibrated to the asset, not the borrower. Two wallets providing identical collateral receive identical terms regardless of their repayment history.

A wallet that has borrowed and repaid on Aave, Compound, and Morpho consistently for three years with zero liquidations, healthy collateral ratios maintained through multiple market cycles, is a fundamentally different counterparty than a wallet that opened last week. Today, Aave’s risk infrastructure cannot see that difference.

VIZI is an attempt to build the data layer that makes that difference visible just like the FICO standard with the 300–850 scale. Built from on-chain repayment history, liquidation record, collateral health, wallet tenure, on-chain income consistency, and sanctions exposure. There is no personal data required, wallet address in, credit score out.

I am not here to tell Aave how to use it. I am here to ask whether Aave’s risk committee would be interested in collecting and measuring data over the next 12 months together to further optimize lending and borrowing.

Proposal

Surface VIZI as a non binding, read only signal available to Aave’s risk committee for monitoring and research purposes. No smart contract changes. No automatic LTV adjustments. No governance vote required beyond this discussion. Strictly research purposes.

Concretely, this means:

  1. Risk committee members can query any wallet address and receive a credit score as part of their manual review process
  2. The score is one additional data point alongside existing risk tooling, not a replacement for anything.
  3. No protocol behavior changes as a result of this integration
  4. VIZI has no access to any Aave contract, data, or user information

This is the lowest possible integration surface.

Why I’m Being Transparent About Readiness

VIZI is early stage. The scoring engine is live and multi-chain. The methodology is published. But the production hardening, audit trail, and institutional validation that would be required before proposing a smart contract integration into a protocol with Aave’s TVL do not yet exist.

I believe it would be disrespectful to this community to propose a production integration before that work is done. What I can offer today is a data relationship, access to the signal, an opportunity to stress test the methodology against Aave’s borrower population, and a seat at the table as VIZI builds toward the standard it is designed to become.

If the risk committee finds the signal useful over the next 12 months, a deeper integration conversation would be appropriate then. If they don’t, nothing has changed for the protocol and I’ve learned something important about what DeFi risk infrastructure actually needs.

Offer to the Aave Ecosystem

Free partnership, no fees, no minimums, no strings attached. Risk committee members can query the VIZI API for any wallet address at no cost. Dismantled at any time by the risk committee.

Security Considerations

Read-only. No write access to any Aave contract. No effect on any existing position. No personal data collected or stored. A VIZI API outage has zero impact on the protocol, the signal simply becomes unavailable.

Next Steps

I’m asking for three things from this discussion:

  1. Feedback from the risk committee on whether VIZI would be a useful signal in their current workflow
  2. Any methodological concerns or questions about how the score is constructed
  3. If there is appetite, an introduction to the appropriate person at Aave Companies or the Aave Foundation to discuss API access

I am not asking for a vote. I am asking for a conversation.

References

VIZI Score methodology: The VIZI® Score — How Your Crypto Credit Score Works (300–850)
How it works: How VIZI® Works — On-Chain Credit Scoring Methodology
Web: vizi.com
Contact: partnerships@vizi.com

2 Likes
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I personally don’t see value in this score for Aave.

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The whole idea for DeFi was to be independent of credit scores, credit history, background, etc, and for obvious reasons. The Equifax, Experian, etc cancers (aka credit agencies) are the main reason I’m using DeFi for borrowing. You have some collateral? You’re welcome to borrow. End of story. You are the one in control.

Has this proposal been written as a joke by Experian? Let’s add an external, off-chain system of control to DeFi … what could go wrong?

Hard pass.

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@VIZI please DM me (we cannot send DMs to your profile). Thanks

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I want to flag something that I don’t think has been addressed clearly enough in this proposal.

VIZI describes this as a “read-only” integration with “no access to any Aave contract or user data.” That framing is technically accurate — but it obscures a real data flow that the risk committee should think carefully about.

When a risk committee member queries a wallet address through the VIZI API, that query travels to VIZI’s servers. VIZI now knows which wallets Aave is watching. Over time, that is not nothing — it is a behavioral dataset of Aave’s internal risk monitoring activity.

What happens to that data? The proposal does not say. There is no data usage agreement referenced, no retention policy, no prohibition on monetization. VIZI is an early-stage company by their own admission. Early-stage companies face pressure, pivot, get acquired, or shut down. In any of those scenarios — what happens to the query logs?

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the standard question any institution asks before routing monitoring activity through a third-party API. The fact that this proposal does not address it is itself a signal worth noting.

I am not saying VIZI has bad intentions. I am saying good intentions are not a data governance policy. Before the risk committee engages with this — even informally — I would want to see explicit answers to:

  • What data does VIZI log from API queries?

  • Who owns that data, and under what terms?

  • What happens to it if VIZI shuts down, is acquired, or pivots?

The vision here is genuinely interesting. But “trust us, it’s read-only” is not enough for a protocol with Aave’s TVL.

@MconnectDAO

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