De.fi ships two distinct products:
- De.fi Scanner - free, scan any contract address, get a risk score. Public utility, no sub.
- De.fi Shield - $9.99 / month. The product on their pricing page. Wallet-level continuous monitoring: it walks your wallet’s existing approvals and ERC-20 / NFT holdings, runs 100+ detectors on each, flags revoke candidates, and warns when an approval becomes risky.
People sometimes compare RektRadar against De.fi Shield because the prices land in the same range ($9.99 vs 19.99 €). Apart from the price tag, they answer different questions.
This post walks through the difference, because picking the wrong one wastes money in the obvious direction and damages security in the less obvious direction.
What De.fi Shield does
Think of Shield as the antivirus equivalent for an EVM wallet. It runs in the background and re-scans, periodically, everything your wallet already touches.
- Approval audit. Every
approve()you have ever signed (Uniswap routers, NFT marketplaces, gaming contracts) gets re-evaluated. If the approved contract gets a new flag - owner reclaimed, exploit reported, blacklisted - Shield surfaces it and offers a one-click revoke. - Held-token scanner. ERC-20s sitting in your wallet are re-scored. If a token you bought 6 months ago suddenly gets
hidden_mintortrading_pausedflagged, you get notified. - NFT contract scanner. Same logic for ERC-721 / ERC-1155 holdings.
- Dashboard view. One screen, ranked by risk, “revoke” buttons inline.
The mental model: De.fi Shield protects what is already in your wallet. You connect once, the service watches forever, you act when it pings you.
What RektRadar does
RektRadar is a different shape: per-contract, pre-purchase analysis on Ethereum mainnet, plus continuous monitoring after analysis (5 post-launch checks every 5 minutes).
- 9-dimension scan on demand. Paste an address, get a 0-100 risk score backed by 80+ flags across honeypot simulation, source code patterns, bytecode opcodes, liquidity, distribution, deployer profiling, network graph, real-time events, sandwich detection.
- Mempool detection. New token deployments and first buys are caught in the mempool before they hit a block, so the analysis is available before the first retail buy lands.
- Deployer graph crawler. Multi-hop funding trace from the deployer wallet up to known seeds (CEX hot wallets, mixers, previous scammer wallets). Cluster ID assignment.
- /scam/<ticker> hubs. Every flagged contract is grouped by ticker. Want to see every fake $USDC contract on Ethereum?
app.rektradar.io/scam/USDClists the 245 of them flagged so far.
Mental model: RektRadar protects you from buying a scam in the first place. You paste an address before the buy, you take a decision based on the score.
The two-axis table
The clearest way to compare them is to split by what you are protecting against:
| Buying a scam (pre-purchase) | Holding a token that becomes scammy (post-purchase) | Approval drain (unrelated to token quality) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| De.fi Shield | scanner is free, but Shield is for held assets | ✓ core feature | ✓ core feature |
| RektRadar | ✓ core feature (mempool + 80+ flags + cluster) | ✓ 5 post-launch checks every 5 minutes for 30 days | not a feature (we focus on the contract, not the user’s approvals) |
Three observations:
- They overlap on “token I hold becomes scammy”, but reach it differently. Shield re-scans assets every time you load the dashboard. RektRadar re-scans contracts on its own schedule (5 checks / 30 days post-launch) and pushes alerts on score downgrades.
- De.fi Shield does not have a real “pre-purchase” feature. Their free Scanner does, and it’s actually decent - but it’s the free product, not the sub. The $9.99 buys the always-on background watcher, not pre-purchase scans (those would be Scanner usage which is free).
- RektRadar does not do approval audit. We don’t read your wallet, we don’t enumerate your approvals, we don’t compete with the “revoke risky approves” feature.
Pricing in context
| De.fi Shield | RektRadar Basic | RektRadar Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 / mo | 19.99 € / mo | 49.99 € / mo |
| Trial | none (info as of May 2026) | 30 days, no card | 30 days, no card |
| What you get | wallet-level watcher | per-contract 9-dimension scan + mempool + cluster | + 80+ flags, 5-step workflow, live feed, token forensics, 3D graph |
| Multi-chain | yes (most EVM) | Ethereum only | Ethereum only |
If your concern is “did I forget to revoke an approval to a draining contract”, Shield is the right tool. Its price is honestly fair for what it covers, and our product does not duplicate it.
If your concern is “is this token I am about to buy a scam”, RektRadar Basic is the right tool. The free De.fi Scanner can also answer this, but with shallower signals (no mempool, no cluster). The 19.99 € buys you the depth.
When to use both
A wallet that holds non-trivial value across multiple positions probably benefits from both, because the threats are different:
- Shield is your insurance against your own past decisions (every approve you ever signed, every NFT you ever minted).
- RektRadar is your defense before the next decision (every buy you are about to make on a contract you have not interacted with yet).
They are not competing line items in a budget. They are two distinct categories of crypto-security tooling that happen to have similar monthly tickets.
When to use only one
- If you trade new tokens (mempool window, fresh deployments, brand-jack risk): RektRadar. Shield will warn you only after the contract is already in your wallet, which is too late.
- If you mostly hold (DeFi LPs, NFTs, long-term positions) and rarely buy new contracts: Shield. Approval hygiene is the larger surface area for your risk.
- If you are just starting in crypto with under 0.5 ETH and one or two positions: either is overkill. Use the free Scanner from either side until the value parked in your wallet justifies the monthly.
TL;DR
| Question | Tool |
|---|---|
| ”Should I buy this token?” | RektRadar |
| ”Should I revoke this approval?” | De.fi Shield |
| ”Did this token I hold get worse since I bought it?” | Either (different mechanism, same answer) |
| “Is there a known scam factory deploying brand-jacks of $TICKER right now?” | RektRadar (cluster signal) |
| “Which dApps am I exposed to via approve()?” | De.fi Shield |
We have nothing against De.fi. The Scanner is part of the public-good infrastructure of crypto, and Shield is a legitimate product for a real problem. The “competition” framing is mostly a price-tag coincidence - once you map the products to the threats they each address, they slot into different parts of the same security stack.
Try the free scan on rektradar.io if pre-purchase is the part of the stack you have not covered yet.