Why Portfolio APIs Disagree About Net Worth

If two portfolio APIs return different net worth for the same address, the instinct is to blame price feeds. That is almost never the cause.

On a clean single-protocol Aave wallet, every EVM API in our nine-provider benchmark reconciles to within 0.2%. Prices are a solved problem. What is not solved is knowing what the wallet holds in the first place.

A balance query is not a portfolio

Ask an RPC node what an address holds and you get a list of token balances. For a wallet that only holds spot tokens, that list is the portfolio.

For a wallet that has done anything in DeFi, the tokens in it are receipts:

The last two are the reason the gaps get extreme. A perp position is not a token at all — it is state inside a protocol. An API that only enumerates tokens cannot see it, and will not tell you it cannot see it. It returns a number that looks complete.

How large the gap gets

From the benchmark, same wallets, same day:

• Multi-sector whale1.6× more
  $28.60M

  $46.27M
• Solana DeFi whale2.7× more
  $9.67M

  $26.04M
• Derive options book3.3× more
  $401.6k

  $1.33M
• Hyperliquid perps2.1× more
  $27k

  $56k

Each row is scaled to its own maximum — these are four different wallets, so compare within a row, not across. Source: benchmark.octav.fi, 2026-07-13.

Across the wallet set the spread between token-only and full-portfolio APIs runs from 10× to 600×.

Four failure modes to test for

When you evaluate a provider, these are the specific things that break. Test them with a wallet you already know the answer for.

1. Silent omission. The API returns 200 OK with a partial portfolio and no indication that a sector was skipped. This is the dangerous one — an error you can handle, a confident wrong number you cannot.

2. Receipt tokens priced as tokens. An LST priced from a thin market rather than from the underlying stake. An LP token priced by its own market rather than by pool composition.

3. Double counting. The same value reported twice — once as the receipt token and once as the decoded position. Ask your provider whether it ships a price source per asset so you can audit which is which.

4. Chain gaps presented as zero. A provider without Solana support does not return "unsupported"; it returns a portfolio without the Solana half.

What to ask a provider

• Which sectors do you decode: lending, LP, staking, perps, options?
• Which chains have DeFi decoding, not just token balances?
• Do you return a price source per asset?
• What happens when a position type is unsupported — omitted, or flagged?
• How do you avoid double-counting receipt tokens?

The practical consequence

For a fund, this is not an academic problem. A NAV built on an API that misses a sector is wrong in a way no amount of downstream reconciliation will catch, because the missing positions never enter the pipeline. See What Is NAV Reporting for Crypto Funds? for how position enumeration feeds the rest of the process, and Tracking DeFi Positions Across Multiple Chains for why the problem multiplies per chain.