Gauntlet

Gauntlet is a quantitative DeFi infrastructure firm that operates across two closely related lines of work: curated yield vaults for institutional and retail depositors, and applied risk management advisory services for major onchain protocols. Founded in 2018, it has grown into one of the most consequential risk firms in decentralized finance, with the risk models it builds supporting over 30% of all DeFi total value locked — more than $42 billion — across more than a dozen L1 and L2 networks.

Background and Team

Gauntlet was founded by Tarun Chitra, a Wall Street-trained quantitative researcher who previously worked at D.E. Shaw Research and trading firm Vatic Labs. Chitra built Gauntlet around the thesis that DeFi protocols needed the same kind of rigorous, data-driven risk modelling that governs traditional financial markets, and that the complexity of onchain incentives, liquidation mechanics, and oracle dependencies demanded dedicated, continuous research. The firm's team draws from high-frequency trading desks, academic finance, and smart-contract engineering, and has published over 40 research papers with more than 1,000 citations.

In 2022 Gauntlet raised a $24 million Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $1 billion valuation. In July 2026 it closed a $125 million Series C — its largest raise to date — from a single investor, Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings. SBI is one of the most active institutional participants in digital assets, with prior stakes in Morpho, Ripple, and Circle.

How It Works: Applied Research and Risk Management

Gauntlet's core methodology involves continuous, agent-based simulation. Rather than static parameter recommendations, the team stress-tests protocol configurations under thousands of scenarios — from 30-second volatility spikes to extended multi-week market crashes. These simulations feed into real-time parameter management, where Gauntlet actively updates risk settings in live protocol governance to prevent bad debt, over-incentivisation, or liquidity shortfalls.

This applied research arm — Gauntlet Applied Research (GAR) — works with protocols including Compound Finance (a partnership renewed through at least September 2026 covering 28 deployments across seven chains), Uniswap (where GAR optimised $32 million in incentives and contributed to $62 billion in cumulative volume on Unichain), and NEAR Protocol. GAR's work covers incentive design, borrow and supply cap calibration, liquidation threshold tuning, and mechanism design for governance systems.

Vault Products

Beginning with its curated vault business, Gauntlet expanded beyond advisory work to directly managing depositor capital. It runs over 60 vaults across more than six chains — including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Solana — in several categories:

Lending vaults supply depositor assets into vetted lending markets, with Gauntlet's curation engine continuously rebalancing across pools based on utilisation rates, oracle risk, collateral quality, and protocol design assessments.

Restaking vaults optimise for points and restaking yields across relevant protocols.

Levered RWA vaults combine DeFi leverage with tokenised real-world assets such as treasuries and private credit. Gauntlet built the first onchain implementation of this structure in partnership with Apollo, Securitize, Morpho, and Polygon.

Gauntlet USD Alpha (gtUSDa) is a cross-chain stablecoin yield vault offering multi-strategy, multi-chain stablecoin yields from a single position.

As of mid-2026 Gauntlet manages over $1.6 billion in total vault TVL. The platform has over 150 fintech and institutional integrations, including Trust Wallet, Coinbase, Circle, Binance, Ledger, and OKX. For risk surveillance it deploys tooling from Hypernative, Zeroshadow, and Chainalysis.

Aera: Vault Infrastructure

Aera is Gauntlet's onchain vault infrastructure layer. It provides the smart-contract primitives and management interface underpinning Gauntlet's own curated strategies, and is also available to third-party protocols and asset managers that want to deploy managed treasury or yield strategies onchain without building the infrastructure themselves.

Solana Presence

Gauntlet extended its vault business to Solana in 2025, launching curated positions on two of the ecosystem's major protocols.

Kamino Finance is Solana's largest lending protocol by TVL, with roughly $3.5 billion locked as of late 2025. Following a May 2025 v2 upgrade, Kamino introduced curated earn vaults — managed by designated risk curators — alongside its permissionless market layer. Gauntlet was onboarded as an official Kamino vault curator and launched two vaults: Gauntlet USDC Prime, targeting USDC lenders, and Gauntlet SOL Balanced, targeting SOL depositors. Gauntlet's curation engine evaluates each lending pool's liquidity depth, oracle integrity, collateral behaviour, and protocol design before inclusion, then adjusts allocations dynamically based on real-time risk signals.

Drift Protocol is Solana's primary decentralised perpetuals exchange. Gauntlet builds delta-neutral vault strategies on Drift's infrastructure, using the protocol's cross-margining system and transparent onchain order book to manage exposure while targeting risk-adjusted yield. The Drift vaults are part of a broader ecosystem of over 20 structured-product strategies on the platform, with Gauntlet cited as one of Drift's leading vault curators.

Combined, Gauntlet's Kamino and Drift presence accounted for over $140 million in TVL on Solana. Both vault categories are accessible through Phantom wallet, Solana's most widely used non-custodial wallet, lowering the barrier for everyday users to access institutional-calibre yield management on Solana.

Fit in the Ecosystem

Gauntlet occupies a distinct role in DeFi: it sits between the protocol layer and the end user, providing the risk intelligence that makes large-scale capital deployment across permissionless markets safer. For Solana specifically, Gauntlet's involvement in both the lending (Kamino) and perpetuals (Drift) verticals brings quantitative risk infrastructure that has been tested across billions of dollars of capital on Ethereum and other chains. As institutional adoption of onchain yield grows, the combination of vault curation, protocol risk management, and onchain infrastructure that Gauntlet offers positions it as a foundational layer for how serious capital enters and operates within DeFi on Solana.