What Is Gauntlet? The DeFi Risk Firm and Vault Curator

Company background

Gauntlet began in 2018 as a blockchain analytics company and later moved into curating crypto vaults, according to The Block. Tarun Chitra is founder and CEO; before Gauntlet he worked in quantitative research at D.E. Shaw Research and Vatic Labs. John Morrow has identified himself as a Gauntlet co-founder in public governance posts.

Gauntlet's About page shows Ribbit, Polychain, Coinbase, Standard Crypto and Paradigm among its investors. The Block reported that a $23.8 million Series B led by Ribbit Capital in 2022 valued the company at $1 billion, and that on July 9, 2026, Gauntlet raised a $125 million Series C with SBI Holdings, through SBI Holdings USA, Inc., as the sole investor. The 2026 valuation was not disclosed.

The company's Terms of Service, last updated November 8, 2023, are governed by Delaware law, with disputes handled by JAMS arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware. Gauntlet does not publish a street address or headcount on its site.

What Gauntlet does for protocols

For DeFi protocols, Gauntlet sells modeling work rather than software licenses. Its Terms of Service name four service lines: full-service economic risk management, ecosystem risk infrastructure and advisory, incentive optimization, and custom research. Fees are set in individual proposals and are not published as a price list.

In practice, the work looks like this, based on Gauntlet's January 2026 recap of its Applied Research unit:

• Risk parameter management. For Compound, Gauntlet runs simulations to set collateral factors, supply caps and interest-rate curves, and monitors markets around the clock. It describes a relationship of more than five years covering 28 Compound deployments across seven chains.
• Incentive optimization. For Uniswap, Gauntlet says it allocated $32 million in liquidity incentives across Unichain and Uniswap v4 markets in 2025.
• Governance and mechanism design. It designed governance mechanics for NEAR's House of Stake.
• Stress testing. It modeled how Decibel, a perpetual futures exchange on Aptos, would behave under extreme volatility.

Engagements with DAO-governed protocols such as Compound and Aave have been approved through public governance proposals, so their scope and price can usually be read on those forums.

The Aave departure

Gauntlet was Aave's independent risk manager from 2020 until February 21, 2024, when it announced on Aave's governance forum that it was leaving. The post, written by co-founder John Morrow, cited "inconsistent guidelines and unwritten objectives" among the largest stakeholders, disputes over duplicate proposals and criticism of its work. The episode is a useful reminder that a DeFi risk adviser's influence depends on a governance mandate that token holders can withdraw.

How Gauntlet vaults work

The second, newer half of Gauntlet's business faces depositors directly. A curated vault is a smart contract that accepts deposits of one asset, such as USDC, and spreads them across lending markets according to rules the curator sets. Gauntlet chooses which markets the vault may use, how much can go into each, and when to rebalance. Depositors earn whatever interest those markets pay, minus any vault fee.

According to Gauntlet's VaultBook documentation (updated April 3, 2026), the firm curates more than 80 vaults across three platforms:

Gauntlet's homepage reports more than $1.8 billion allocated to its vaults and more than 150 integrations with fintechs and institutions, while The Block's July 2026 article cited more than $1.5 billion. Both are company-reported and undated or loosely dated, so treat them as approximate. Gauntlet also names Trust Wallet, Coinbase, Bitpanda, Ledger and others among the partners that route user deposits into its strategies.

The firm points to one stress event as a demonstration: on October 30, 2025, it says its USDT vaults on Morpho took in $775 million of new supply, a roughly 40-fold jump, and yields returned to prior levels within ten days.

What depositors should understand

A Gauntlet-curated vault is not a bank deposit or a fixed-income product. Practical points before depositing:

• Layered smart-contract risk. Your funds depend on the vault contract, the underlying platform (Morpho, Aera or Kamino) and every lending market the vault uses.
• Variable yield. Returns come from borrowers' interest and incentives, both of which change constantly. A displayed APY is a recent rate, not a promise.
• Withdrawal liquidity. If borrowers have taken most of a market's supply, withdrawals can be delayed until loans are repaid or the curator reallocates.
• Curator powers. What a curator can and cannot change differs by platform. VaultBook documents each vault's strategy, curation method and fee structure, and should be read before depositing.
• Not an investment adviser. Gauntlet's terms state it is not SEC-registered as an investment adviser. Its vault strategies are not personalized advice.
• Sanctions and access. The terms exclude sanctioned persons and say access may be limited by jurisdiction.

For background on lending markets and yield sources, see OBOL's introduction to DeFi, and compare vault products in the yield aggregator ratings.

Security and monitoring

Gauntlet says it monitors its vaults onchain and has incident-response and fund-tracing arrangements with Hypernative, Zeroshadow and Chainalysis. These are monitoring and recovery services: they can shorten reaction time after an exploit but cannot prevent a flaw in an underlying protocol.

OBOL evaluates the firm's advisory work separately in OBOL's Gauntlet review, and the protocol economics advisor ratings cover comparable firms.

Official channels

• Website: gauntlet.xyz
• VaultBook (vault documentation): vaultbook.gauntlet.xyz
• X: twitter.com/gauntlet_xyz
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/gauntlet-xyz

Gauntlet does not list a public support email on its site; enquiries go through the contact options on gauntlet.xyz.