YO Protocol

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

YO is a multi-chain yield optimizer that rebalances deposits across venues on Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Arbitrum. TVL was $34.5M at the 2026-08-14 survey, below the $100M materiality line, and size alone rejects it: one practice advising 100 households moves $1M to $8M into a venue on the same research, and at this size that book becomes the exit crush, whatever the protocol’s quality. A reopened file would weigh it as delegated allocation: the depositor inherits whatever the optimizer holds, and allocation across vetted venues is the service we charge for ourselves.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• TVL sustained above $100M for 30 days

The research file

Mechanism applicability

YO documentation describes ERC-4626 yoVaults that issue transferable yoTokens and allocate deposits among whitelisted yield pools across supported chains. Operators and an allocation algorithm set target weights and rebalance positions. That establishes delegated yield-aggregation membership: a depositor inherits the vault’s changing underlying venues, smart contracts and operator decisions. It does not validate any current vault allocation or downstream protocol.

Current observation and scope

The DefiLlama protocol API read on 2026-08-15 showed about $34.1M of tracked YO Protocol TVL across Base, Solana, Ethereum and Arbitrum, below the shared v1 dossier’s $100M line. Current official documentation continued to describe active vault allocation and rebalancing. Vault holdings, chain-specific liquidity, privileged roles, audit coverage, incidents, incentive dependence and downstream risk remain deferred.

Exit applicability

YO says withdrawals below 5% of a vault’s TVL can be instant when enough liquid assets are available, while larger withdrawals may require strategy divestment for up to 24 hours through its redemption process. Exit capacity is therefore vault-specific and depends on downstream liquidity. At the current aggregate size, an advised position could be material to one vault even when the protocol-wide number appears adequate.

Why the class rule decides

The shared v1 below-materiality dossier controls this application. Reopen only after reproducible surveys show at least $100M of protocol TVL continuously for 30 days and live vault allocations remain observable. Then review each vault separately for allocations, governance and operator controls, contracts and audits, downstream eligibility, incidents, fees and incentives, and observed instant and asynchronous exits; also apply the separate delegated-allocation rule. Threshold passage would trigger review, not approval.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• YO Docs — protocol FAQ and allocation mechanism · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: ERC-4626 vaults, yoTokens, whitelisted pools, target allocations, daily rebalancing
• YO Docs — withdrawal process · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: instant withdrawal, 5% vault TVL, strategy divestment, 24-hour window
• DefiLlama — YO Protocol survey record · secondary · accessed 2026-08-15
  Supports: current TVL, supported chains, yield-aggregator category

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.