Gauntlet Review 2026: Curated DeFi Yield Vaults for Institutions

Gauntlet is a DeFi risk-management firm that says it has worked in the sector since 2018. It began by modeling risk for large lending protocols and now curates yield vaults for institutional partners. DefiLlama lists it under Risk Curators, with roughly $1.54B in TVL across 14 chains.

The homepage describes it as a yield curator for fintechs, exchanges, asset managers and issuers. It reports $1.8B+ of capital allocated to its vaults and 150+ integrations. These figures are company claims, and the DefiLlama TVL is lower.

Named integrations include KAST, CoolWallet, Raenest, Bitso and DPT, along with a Privy partnership for embedded yield in smart wallets. Gauntlet also sells risk assessments, stress tests and incentive design, and publishes research and protocol risk dashboards.

Public reporting mentions a Series B round that valued the company at $1B in 2022 and a $125M investment from SBI Holdings. Gauntlet is listed on DefiLlama since May 2025 and has no token.

Gauntlet acts as a curator. A curator chooses which lending markets and yield sources a vault can use, sets limits and rebalances over time. Users deposit an asset such as USDC or ETH and receive a share of the vault, and the vault allocates that capital across approved strategies.

Gauntlet says its approach combines quantitative, model-driven risk frameworks with human oversight. Its vaults lend, restake and run multi-strategy allocations across many markets, protocols and chains. One example on the homepage is Gauntlet USD Alpha, which uses variable and fixed yield on protocols like Morpho and Pendle across Ethereum and layer-2 networks.

Many users reach these vaults through partner apps instead of Gauntlet directly. Partners such as neobanks, exchanges and wallets integrate the vaults so their users can earn yield inside the app, while Gauntlet manages the strategy and risk behind it.

Fees are not set out on the homepage or in the DefiLlama data. Vault fee structures, such as any performance or management fee, are not published.

The homepage says users of at least one integration, the KAST Earn program, pay no gas fees and that protocol rewards are auto-redeemed and compounded. For details of a specific vault, readers should check the vault page in the Gauntlet app and the VaultBook documentation before depositing.

No audits are listed on DefiLlama for Gauntlet. The homepage points to a defense-in-depth security stack with Hypernative for onchain monitoring, Zeroshadow for round-the-clock response monitoring and Chainalysis for tracing. These are monitoring tools and do not replace code audits, so readers should look for audit reports on the specific vault contracts they use.

Vault depositors face smart-contract risk, risk from underlying protocols like Morpho and Pendle, and market risk such as depegs or liquidity crunches. Curation can reduce but not remove these. The project does not mention any hacks or incidents. Regulatory status for the vaults is not stated, so check the rules in your jurisdiction. This is not investment advice.

Gauntlet is for fintechs, exchanges, wallets, asset managers and stablecoin or RWA issuers that want to add onchain yield to a product. It also suits crypto holders and treasuries who prefer curated, risk-managed vaults over picking DeFi markets themselves, provided they accept smart-contract and market risk.