Gauntlet, a leading provider of decentralized finance (DeFi) risk management tools, has seen its total value locked (TVL), a measure of the assets deposited in its vaults, drop sharply over the past seven days, falling 22.84% to $1.325 billion.
That has erased about $380 million in dollar-denominated value from a week-ago high of about $1.72 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. The decline accelerated on Thursday with a drop of 7.57% in a single day.
The main driver, according to Gauntlet, was the conclusion of OKX’s pre-deposit campaign on Katana, the DeFi-focused blockchain. Pre-deposit campaigns, where users are incentivized to deposit capital before a protocol launches, can produce sharp spikes in TVL that quickly taper off once the campaign ends or if a token airdrop occurs. The chart bears this out: Gauntlet’s TVL rose sharply around March 2 before reversing just as quickly.
Asset outflows are predominantly based on stablecoins, Gauntlet noted.
The scale of the move is notable given what Gauntlet actually does. Think of it as a risk management consultancy for DeFi: the company helps protocols understand, for example, what percentage of a borrower’s collateral would be at risk of liquidation if ETH fell 30% overnight. He has no funds of his own; instead, it sets the parameters that govern how lending markets and vaults behave.
Your TVL is a measure of the capital held within the systems that Gauntlet is responsible for safeguarding. When that figure drops sharply, it may reflect stress in the market or, as in this case, the mechanical end of an incentive program.
Gauntlet, which received a $1 billion valuation in 2022, currently manages three vaults: essentially pooled deposit accounts where users lock capital in exchange for a return. The vaults contain USDC, BTC and WETH, respectively. The USDC vault is the most liquid and offers an APY of 4.86%, while the others offer between 2% and 2.3%. The outflows could also reflect DeFi traders rotating capital towards higher-yielding alternatives – SOL-based protocols like Jito, for example, are currently offering 5.69%.
Gauntlet has gone through big capital swings before. In October 2025, its USDT vaults absorbed a single transaction deposit of $775 million (a 40x TVL increase) and recovered to pre-deposit levels within ten days through active reallocation and new additions to the collateral market. The firm framed this week’s outflows in similar terms, noting that incentive campaign endings, token generation events, and changes in market conditions regularly produce short-term swings in either direction.
“Institutional risk managers manage these events,” the firm said in a statement to CoinDesk. “Work to maintain rates, preserve capital supplied to vaults and adjust to market conditions.”
Oliver Knight contributed reporting to this story.
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