Headline: Gauntlet Loses $380M in a Week as OKX Pre‑Deposit Push on Katana Winds Down
Gauntlet, a leading DeFi risk-management firm, saw its total value locked (TVL) plunge 22.84% over seven days — a loss of roughly $380 million — falling from about $1.72 billion to $1.325 billion, according to DeFiLlama. The drop accelerated Thursday with a single-day decline of 7.57%.
The culprit, Gauntlet says, was the end of OKX’s pre-deposit campaign on Katana, the exchange’s DeFi-focused chain. Pre-deposit campaigns incentivize users to park capital ahead of a protocol launch or token event, often producing sharp TVL spikes that quickly unwind once incentives stop or airdrops are distributed. Gauntlet’s TVL surged around March 2 and reversed just as steeply once the campaign concluded.
Outflows were largely stablecoin-based, the firm noted. That makes sense given Gauntlet’s vault mix: it manages three pooled vaults — USDC, BTC and WETH — with the USDC vault being the most liquid. Current yields sit around 4.86% APY for USDC and roughly 2–2.3% for the BTC and WETH vaults. Some capital may also be rotating into higher-yield alternatives; for example, SOL-based protocols like Jito are offering about 5.69% APY.
It’s important to clarify what Gauntlet does: the company doesn’t custody user funds. Instead, it provides risk models and parameter-setting services for lending markets and vaults — for instance, estimating how much borrower collateral might be liquidated if ETH plunged 30% overnight. TVL in this context measures the capital held within systems that Gauntlet helps configure and safeguard. Sudden TVL swings can therefore reflect mechanical unwindings of incentive programs, not necessarily failures of the underlying risk infrastructure.
Gauntlet — which was valued at $1 billion in 2022 — has seen volatile capital movements before. In October 2025 a single $775 million deposit into its USDT vault caused a roughly 40x TVL jump; Gauntlet said it restored balance within ten days by reallocating assets and adding new collateral markets. This week’s outflows, the firm told CoinDesk, are another example of short-term swings driven by campaign endings, token events and changing market conditions. “Institutional risk managers manage through these events,” Gauntlet said, adding that it works to maintain rates and preserve capital supplied to vaults while adapting to markets.
Oliver Knight contributed reporting to this story.
Read more: Tokenized Apollo Credit Fund Makes DeFi Debut With Levered-Yield Strategy by Securitize, Gauntlet.
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