Leaderboard & ranking
How Chamber ranks vaults. Vault Score and Risk Factor — what they measure, how they're calculated, and what they don't tell you.
Chamber's leaderboard helps depositors compare vaults at a glance. Two metrics do most of the work: Vault Score (an ordered performance summary) and Risk Factor (a 1–5 downside-volatility rating). Both are backward-looking. Neither predicts future returns.
Vault Score
A single number combining risk-adjusted performance and vault size.
Vault Score = Sortino ratio × √(7-day average vault value)Two components:
Sortino ratio. A common risk-adjusted return metric — excess return divided by downside deviation. Rewards steady upward performance and penalises downside volatility. Unlike the Sharpe ratio, it ignores upside volatility (because upside volatility is what depositors want).
√(7-day average vault value). A size term. Rewards vaults that have actually deployed meaningful capital.
Why the size term
Without the size term, a vault with $100 AUM that got lucky could top the leaderboard. That wouldn't be useful information. The √(value) term means:
Size matters, but with diminishing returns — a $10M vault doesn't score 100× a $100k vault; it scores ~10× (all else equal).
A new vault with no meaningful capital scores low even if early performance is good. It has to get capital to get credit.
Eligibility
Not every vault is eligible for a Vault Score. Vaults typically need a minimum track record (in days) and some minimum level of performance before they're ranked. Exact thresholds are set in the app, not onchain, and can change — check the in-app leaderboard filters for current eligibility rules.
What Vault Score doesn't capture
Strategy difficulty. A stablecoin yield vault and a leveraged ETH vault are scored by the same formula despite being very different products. Both should be evaluated on their own terms.
Forward returns. Past Sortino doesn't predict future Sortino.
Manager changes. If a vault changes strategy or manager, the score takes weeks to catch up.
Correlation. Two vaults with high Vault Scores may hold correlated positions; holding both doesn't diversify you as much as you'd think.
Risk Factor
A 1–5 rating based on downside deviation — how much the vault's share price has moved down historically.
1 — historically low downside volatility. Stablecoin strategies, tight spreads.
2 — low. Steady yield, diversified exposure.
3 — moderate. Typical managed crypto strategy.
4 — high. Concentrated positions, directional bets.
5 — very high. Leveraged tokens, thinly-traded assets, aggressive strategies.
Risk Factor is useful as a first-pass filter — if you want something that won't move much, look for 1s and 2s. If you want aggressive alpha, you'll find it at 4s and 5s.
What Risk Factor doesn't capture
Tail risk. A strategy that's stable 99% of the time and catastrophic 1% of the time can show a low Risk Factor despite carrying high real risk.
Strategy changes. If a manager pivots to a riskier approach, Risk Factor lags.
Smart-contract risk. Contract-level risks (bugs, exploits) don't move with vault share prices and aren't in Risk Factor.
See Deposit → Risks for the full risk picture.
The leaderboard UI
The Chamber app leaderboard lets you:
Filter by chain.
Filter by category (managed, automated, AI-assisted, etc. — a label managers set in vault settings).
Sort by Vault Score, AUM, age, or fees.
Filter by Risk Factor.
How to read the leaderboard
A few sensible rules of thumb:
Filter by your risk tolerance first. Don't sort by top Vault Score across the whole board — high scores at Risk Factor 5 are not the same product as high scores at Risk Factor 1.
Filter by track-record length. Vaults less than a few months old have noisy Vault Scores. Require at least 2–3 months of history for a signal you can rely on.
Don't treat the leaderboard as a recommendation. It's a sortable directory, not a buy list. Read the vault page before depositing.
Related
Deposit → Find a vault — depositor's workflow for browsing.
NAV and accounting — what share price movements (which Risk Factor reads from) actually represent.
Risks — the fuller risk framing.
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