Gauntlet — a leading risk-management firm in decentralized finance — saw roughly $380 million leave its vaults this week after an OKX-led incentive program on the Katana chain wrapped up, according to on-chain data and the firm.
DeFiLlama shows Gauntlet’s total value locked (TVL) plunged 22.84% over seven days to $1.325 billion from a peak near $1.72 billion, erasing about $380 million in dollar-denominated value. The decline accelerated on Thursday with a single-day drop of 7.57%. The company attributes the move mainly to the conclusion of OKX’s pre-deposit campaign on Katana — a common source of short-lived TVL spikes.
Pre-deposit campaigns encourage users to park assets ahead of launches or token drops, producing quick inflows that often unwind once incentives stop or an airdrop occurs. Gauntlet’s TVL surged sharply around March 2 and reversed just as steeply after the campaign ended, the firm said. The outflows were largely stablecoin-based.
It’s important to note what Gauntlet actually does: it doesn’t custody user funds. The firm acts as a risk-management consultancy and protocol operator, setting parameters that determine how lending markets and vaults behave — for example, stress-testing liquidation thresholds under a sudden ETH price drop. The TVL figure reflects the capital held in vaults and markets Gauntlet helps manage, so big swings can be mechanical (incentive programs ending) rather than signs of solvency problems.
Gauntlet, which was valued at $1 billion in 2022, currently manages three vaults that hold USDC, BTC and WETH. The USDC vault is the most liquid and is offering an APY of 4.86%; the BTC and WETH vaults are offering roughly 2%–2.3%. Some capital rotation toward higher-yield options may also be a factor — for example, certain SOL-based protocols such as Jito are currently advertising yields around 5.69%.
The firm has weathered dramatic capital moves before. In October 2025, Gauntlet’s USDT vaults absorbed a single $775 million deposit — a roughly 40x jump in TVL — and returned to prior levels within ten days after reallocating assets and adding new collateral markets. This week’s outflows, Gauntlet suggested, are part of the same pattern driven by incentive schedules and shifting market conditions.
“Institutional risk managers manage through these events,” the firm told CoinDesk. “Working to maintain rates, preserve capital supplied to vaults, and adjusting to market conditions.”
Oliver Knight contributed reporting to the original story.
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