Every week, somewhere in the crypto world, money disappears. Hacks, rug pulls, insolvencies, frozen wallets. Sometimes millions. Sometimes billions. After each incident, people ask the same question: could we have seen this coming? Honestly, often yes. But there was no shared language to name the risk before it materialised. CORE3 is trying to change that. This is a deep dive into what the platform does, how it works, and why the crypto industry needs it.
The problem CORE3 is solving
Anyone evaluating a crypto project today has no shortage of information. Audit reports, TVL dashboards, tokenomics documents, GitHub commit histories, social sentiment scores. The problem is not the volume of data. The concern is that none of it converges into a single standardised measure that everyone reads the same way.
Institutional investors, who are entering the crypto market in increasing numbers, feel this most acutely. They require a repeatable process for quantifying risk. A single audit does not give them that. Neither does TVL. Market sentiment even less so. As CORE3’s own documentation puts it, institutions cannot operationalise risk consistently, builders cannot prove credibility in a standardised way, and retail users cannot compare risk without falling into biased narratives. Dyma Budorin, CEO of HAI Group and co-founder of Hacken, summarised it bluntly in an interview with DL News: āThe industry still suffers from all the same problems it had when I joined in 2017.ā Audits are treated as marketing checkboxes rather than rigorous safeguards. CORE3 is his answer to that issue.
What CORE3 is and where it comes from
CORE3 is an independent analytics platform and the risk intelligence layer built by HAI Group, the parent organisation of the Hacken ecosystem. Hacken was founded in 2017 as a blockchain cybersecurity firm specialising in smart contract audits and has grown into one of the most recognised names in Web3 security. Alongside Hacken, HAI Group also operates HackenProof, a bounty/" data-term-title="Bug Bounty" role="button" tabindex="0">bug bounty platform, and CER.live, a platform that focused on evaluating the security of centralised exchanges.
CORE3 is the next evolution of that work. Where CER.live focused on exchange security, CORE3 expands the scope to the full Web3 landscape: DeFi protocols, centralised exchanges, Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, and individual crypto projects. Importantly, CER.live is not simply a predecessor. According to the official CORE3 documentation, CER.live is actively being migrated into CORE3 in Q2 2026, with full continuity of historical data and scoring. The platform officially launched on 2 April 2026 at the ETHCC conference in Cannes, presenting ratings for 1,426 crypto projects and 253 centralised exchanges.
The Probability of Loss and how it works
The core of CORE3 is the Probability of Loss, shortened to PoL. This is a single number on a scale from 0 to 100. A score of 0 represents exceptional risk management. A score of 100 represents critical risk. Lower is always safer. The score is mapped to a credit-style rating tier: AAA, AA, and A indicate very low probability of loss; BBB, BB, and B indicate moderate and increasing risk; CCC, CC, and C indicate high risk; and DDD, DD, and D indicate critical risk levels. World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s DeFi project, received a D grade with a PoL score of 68.01 at launch, placing it among the 50 riskiest projects in the database, as reported by DL News.
The PoL is not a subjective judgement. It is a composite score derived from 98 assessment metrics spread across six risk domains. CORE3 uses a three-tier structure to build that score. The lowest tier consists of conditions: verifiable data points such as audit remediation status, admin key management, or the presence of a bug bounty program. Those conditions are grouped into metrics: thematic assessments covering areas like smart contract risk or reserve transparency. The metrics then feed into six categories, which form the top-level domains of the assessment.
According to reporting by Incrypted at the ETHCC launch, the six categories are security, finance, operations, regulatory risk, dependencies, and reputation. Missing data is not treated as neutral. CORE3 treats the absence of verifiable information as a risk factor in itself. A project that does not disclose its admin key structure scores worse than one that discloses a reasonably managed structure. Transparency is rewarded directly in the methodology.
There is also a separate layer alongside the PoL called Proof of Voice (PoV). This captures qualitative expert context, such as a project’s relevance to the broader ecosystem or the team’s standing in the community. That context is visible on the platform but carries no weight in the numerical PoL score. The goal is to keep the core metric purely quantitative, independently verifiable, and free from commercial influence.
What the data reveals
CORE3’s methodology was built by analysing more than 4,000 real-world incidents across the crypto industry, including hacks, service outages, and operational failures. Those incidents informed the weighting and thresholds of the scoring system. At launch, the platform covered 1,426 crypto projects and 253 centralised exchanges, totalling over 1,600 entities in the database.
The most striking finding is the industry average: 70.87 out of 100. That is a high number. It means the average project in the crypto sector sits close to the critical end of the risk scale. Budorin described this as evidence of the industry’s low resilience overall. The best-performing projects earn AAA or A grades and sit well below that average. The worst-scoring project at the time of launch was RealT, a fractionalised real estate investment platform.
Transparency as the distinguishing factor
Other platforms assess crypto projects. Credora and Metrika are two established names. Some projects, such as Sky (formerly MakerDAO), have even paid for debt ratings from S&P Global. But CORE3 claims to do something none of them do: make the entire scoring methodology public. Not just the final verdict, but the full reasoning behind it. Every data point, every weighting, and every category-level assessment is visible to anyone who looks.
That has practical consequences. Projects can see exactly why they received a particular score. They can submit new data, update documentation, or request a reassessment. All of that is free. CORE3 does not aim to be a gatekeeper that excludes projects. It aims to be a pressure mechanism that incentivises projects to improve their security, transparency, and operational robustness. āMaybe others will copy our methodology,ā Budorin said. āThat is fine if we are making the industry safer.ā
Self-regulation as a strategy
The philosophy behind CORE3 extends beyond technical assessment. Budorin and his team argue explicitly that transparent risk standards are an alternative to government regulation. If the industry does not regulate itself through shared norms, a growing number of incidents will lead to stricter legislation. That is not a hypothetical threat. Regulators across Europe, the US, and Asia are actively developing crypto oversight frameworks. The EU’s DAC8 directive, which mandates automatic data sharing between exchanges and tax authorities from 2026, is one concrete example of where that trajectory leads.
A platform like CORE3 gives the industry a chance to shape that agenda from the inside. In April 2026, the team is organising an industry discussion featuring representatives from Moody’s, C4, and CryptoRank. The presence of Moody’s, one of the three largest credit rating agencies in the world, signals that traditional financial institutions are paying serious attention to what CORE3 is building.
The CoinGecko integration
One of CORE3’s most strategically important moves is its deepening partnership with CoinGecko. CoinGecko already operates a Trust Score system for exchanges that millions of users consult when making trading decisions. CORE3 is working to expand that integration by adding new exchange rating parameters and strengthening the existing Trust Score with CORE3 data. The result is that PoL assessments will become visible to CoinGecko’s existing audience without requiring those users to visit a separate platform.
This is a sound distribution strategy. The value of a risk standard depends entirely on how widely it is used. The more people consult a PoL score when evaluating a project, the more pressure projects face to improve that score. By using CoinGecko as a distribution partner, CORE3 reaches an audience already active in the market and accustomed to consulting ratings.
What CORE3 is not yet
It is essential to be clear about what CORE3 is at this stage. It is an MVP, not a finished product. Assessing more than 1,400 projects is impressive for a platform in active development, but the methodology continues to evolve. Budorin has stated publicly that he expects and welcomes criticism. āWe are not the final word,ā he said. āIf a change to our methodology makes sense, we will make it.ā
CORE3 is also not an official ratings agency. The PoL score carries no legal standing and does not constitute investment advice. The platform has no regulatory authority and cannot compel projects to change their behaviour. Its only instrument is transparency: making visible what works and what does not. Whether that is sufficient to drive behavioural change depends on the industry’s willingness to act on what it sees.
There is also the question of coverage. More than 1,400 projects is a large number, but the crypto market contains tens of thousands of active tokens and protocols. A project not listed on CORE3 does not have a bad score. It has no score at all. That distinction is significant for anyone using the database as a research tool.
Why every crypto investor should pay attention
If you hold Bitcoin or any other digital asset, CORE3 is worth bookmarking. Not as a replacement for your research, but as a structured addition to it. The PoL score gives you a single, verifiable reference point when evaluating a project. Which categories score poorly? Which specific metrics are pulling the score down? Has the project submitted data or responded to those findings?
Institutional investors have used similar frameworks to assess traditional financial products for decades. The crypto market has never had an equivalent. CORE3 is a serious attempt to fill that gap. The combination of Hacken’s established security credentials, a fully public methodology, a growing database, and a CoinGecko distribution partnership makes this one of the most credible risk infrastructure projects the sector has produced.
The platform is accessible at app.core3.io. Project teams can view their profile, submit additional data, and request a reassessment. Access is free, and the methodology is fully documented at docs.core3.io.
This article is not investment advice. Trading crypto assets carries risk. PoL scores produced by CORE3 are informational in nature and do not constitute financial or legal advice.
