This note details how Clearstar conducts General Due Diligence on yield opportunities. It is the third step of the Capital Allocation Framework and covers the cross-cutting assessments that apply to every opportunity, regardless of whether it involves a lending protocol, a DEX, a liquid staking derivative, or any other category.
General Due Diligence examines the aspects of an opportunity that affect all participants equally: governance structure, admin key holders and permissions, smart contract security posture, oracle reliability, on-chain financial backing, team reputation, and transparency. These are distinct from the category-specific risks assessed during Asset Due Diligence, Protocol Due Diligence, and Blockchain Due Diligence, which run in parallel.
The primary engine for this stage is VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligent System), Clearstar's own agentic research pipeline. VALIS produces a unified report that is then reviewed and supplemented by a team of analysts before advancing to the APB Risk Rating .
VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligent System) is Clearstar's automated due diligence pipeline. It combines a wide array of internally developed tools with tooling built by leading security researchers in the web3 ecosystem. Its purpose is to systematically analyse the smart contracts, governance structures, on-chain financials, and operational characteristics of a protocol, and to surface vulnerabilities or issues that require attention.
VALIS is not a decision-maker. It is a research tool that produces a structured report, which then serves as the foundation for the human review process described later in this note.
VALIS is triggered automatically once a senior analyst approves the screening package from the Initial Screening stage. No manual configuration or prompting is required; the pipeline ingests the contract addresses, chain information, and protocol metadata collected during screening, and runs its full analysis suite.
The pipeline produces a single, unified report covering all assessment areas (described in the next section). This report is the starting point for the analyst team's review, not a final verdict.
VALIS brings together a broad range of automated analysis capabilities: