Summary
Allez recommends Venus consolidate OEV onto Chainlink as the sole provider, while retaining RedStone as an important partner to support the resilient oracle setup.
Two findings drive the recommendation:
- Chainlink’s auction is competitive. An estimated 8-10 unique solver entities (18 different contracts) placed bids through Chainlink’s solution during the trial while RedStone saw no participation from third-party solvers. This solver diversity on the Chainlink side reflects real competitive market outcomes.
- Chainlink captured materially more addressable value. SVR recaptured 128 BNB versus RedStone’s 28.2 BNB during the trial, at a 28% recapture rate versus RedStone’s 2.0%.
Both vendors published their own reports to this forum and we encourage the community to read both:
- [VRC] Chainlink SVR Performance Report, Esteban Garcia (Chainlink Labs), May 5, 2026.
- [VRC] RedStone OEV Pilot Report, Marcin (RedStone), May 11, 2026.
Background
Venus ran a two-vendor OEV trial starting in early February 2026. RedStone OEV feeds covered eight markets and approximately $702M of deposits. Chainlink OEV feeds covered seven markets and approximately $735M of deposits. Remaining deposits sit in markets handled outside this trial scope. Venus has revenue-share agreements with both providers on captured OEV.
The trial gives Venus governance a data-driven basis for the next decision: keep both providers, consolidate, or rotate. This post lays out what we observed and what we recommend.
Trial results
Window: February 4 – May 5, 2026
| Metric | Chainlink | RedStone |
|---|---|---|
| Recapture Rate | 28% | 2.0% |
| Conditional Recapture Rate | 37% | 75% |
| Collateral Coverage | 75% | 2.4% |
| Liquidation Coverage | 22.6% | 2.1% |
| Solver Diversity | 8 | 2 (same operator) |
| OEV Bids Captured | $79.2k (~128 BNB) | $17.3K (~28.2 BNB) |
| Recapturable bonus captured via OEV | $216.3K | $23k |
| Recapturable bonus left to non-OEV | $66.7K | $834K |
Definitions:
- Recapture rate: OEV bid / addressable liquidation bonus, where bonus is net of Venus’s fixed liquidation fee. Of the recapturable bonus that should have been captured by OEV, how much came back.
- Conditional Recapture rate: OEV bid / liquidation bonus on OEV-executed liquidations. When a liquidation does land through OEV, how much of the bonus comes back.
- Collateral coverage: OEV-liquidated collateral / addressable collateral, in dollars.
- Liquidation coverage: OEV liquidations / addressable liquidations, in count.
- Solver diversity: solver addresses that landed at least one liquidation, with entity-level notes where multiple addresses trace to the same operator.
Reading the table:
- Recapture rate (Chainlink higher). Chainlink returned significantly more value through OEV as a % of the addressable value available to each OEV system. This metric unifies the Conditional recapture rate and collateral coverage to produce the true value capture efficiency of an OEV system and is widely considered the primary metric to consider to standardise analysis.
- Solver diversity (Chainlink higher). 8+ solvers on Chainlink vs. two same-operator addresses on RedStone. This metric matters most for resilience. Chainlink’s recapture rate still has room to improve, and monthly reporting should track whether deeper solver competition raises bid levels.
- Conditional Recapture rate (RedStone higher). RedStone had higher bid amounts per bonus dollar on the liquidations processed through its system. Per-liquidation efficiency and total addressable opportunity captured are distinct measures that are combined to produce Recapture Rate, and Chainlink leads on the latter (Finding #1).
- Coverage (Chainlink higher). Chainlink SVR processed a much larger share of the addressable opportunities through the SVR system than RedStone. As stated above, the bids per each liquidation on SVR were lower than RedStones, but SVR processed much more of the available opportunities. RedStone’s all-time figures take a heavy hit from the THE-token event in March 2026, discussed below.
The THE event
OEV outcomes are event-driven. A small number of large, contested liquidation episodes account for most of the addressable bonus in any given period. The THE-token incident on March 15, 2026 alone accounted for the majority of addressable OEV during this trial window.
RedStone’s OEV path did not capture liquidations in this event, while Venus’s open liquidator network did. Contested events are hard and any single bidder, regardless of vendor, can miss them. Solver diversity hedges that risk, and solver diversity takes the longest to build.
While the THE event was exceptional, it is during these moments that a majority of OEV is generated. We therefore weigh this as OEV systems must handle rare stress events, and governance here is choosing production scenarios rather than average-case performance.
The Atlas acquisition
In late January 2026, Chainlink acquired Atlas (built by FastLane). Atlas was the off-chain auction infrastructure behind RedStone’s Atom system described as a core component of its design. This acquisition has structural implications for non-Chainlink auction systems, as Atlas now exclusively supports Chainlink.
For any non-Chainlink OEV provider, the off-chain auction layer (including order flow, auction logic, solver onboarding, and fairness guarantees) now needs to be rebuilt or sourced elsewhere. While RedStone has made great strides in this work, third-party solver participation is qualitatively lagging, as seen in trial data. Until that participation appears on-chain, and the system is appropriately tested in production, the two systems can’t be directly compared on the kind of auction-competitive outcomes this trial was set up to measure.
What does not change
This proposal is about OEV provider selection, not about retiring any provider as an oracle on Venus. RedStone continues in its existing roles on Venus as the broader Resilient Oracle architecture (pivot/fallback design, exchange-rate growth caps, custom configurations for LSTs and PT tokens) is unchanged. Multi-vendor redundancy at the oracle layer will remain a feature of Venus.
Recommendation
Adopt Chainlink as the sole OEV provider.
- Migrate the markets that use RedStone OEV feeds today (where RedStone is primary and Chainlink is the pivot) to Chainlink OEV feeds. Keep RedStone in its existing pivot and fallback roles on those markets.
- Enable Chainlink OEV feeds on the remaining Chainlink-covered markets that do not yet have them.
- Keep RedStone’s existing non-OEV oracle roles on Venus unchanged.
Acknowledgements
We thank both Chainlink and RedStone teams for the trial and their published reports (Chainlink and RedStone).