Seed-deposit requirement for new market listing
Venus Protocol's assessment for RD-F-071 — scored yellow on the v1.7.0 rubric. The evidence below is the curator's reasoning for this score.
Evidence summary #
Isolated Pool market listings require an initialSupply parameter in the AddMarketInput struct, providing a seed deposit before the market goes live. This partially mitigates the zero-supply empty-market condition. However, the March 2026 THE exploit demonstrates the donation attack is effective on active markets with substantial supply (THE market had 12.2M tokens in genuine deposits, representing 84% of the 14.5M supply cap, before the attack). A seed deposit alone does not prevent the donation attack on active markets. For Core Pool markets, no governance-required minimum seed deposit mechanism was identified in public documentation. The seed deposit mitigates the pure zero-supply empty-market scenario but does not cover the active-market donation pathway that was exploited.
Sources #
- URLVenus Thena Donation Attack — BlockSecBlockSec Thena analysis — 12.2M genuine deposits pre-attack, attack succeeded on active marketretrieved 2026-04-28
- VenusProtocol isolated-pools — GitHubVenusProtocol/isolated-pools — AddMarketInput struct with initialSupply parameterretrieved 2026-04-28
Methodology #
Determine whether market-listing governance or code requires a minimum seed deposit before borrow-enabling a new market.
See the full factor methodology and distribution across all protocols →