Gauntlet, a leading provider of decentralized finance (DeFi) risk management tools, saw its total value locked (TVL), a measure of assets deposited in its vaults, fall sharply over the past seven days, falling 22.84% to $1.325 billion.
That wiped out about $380 million in dollar-denominated value from the high of about $1.72 billion a week ago, according to DeFiLlama data. The decline accelerated on Thursday with a single-day decline of 7.57%.
According to Gauntlet, the main driver was the conclusion of OKX’s pre-filing campaign on the DeFi-focused Katana blockchain. Pre-deposit campaigns – where users are incentivized to park capital before a protocol launches – can produce large spikes in TVL that quickly resolve once the campaign ends or if a token airdrop occurs. The chart confirms this: Gauntlet’s TVL jumped sharply around March 2 before reversing just as sharply.
Asset outflows are primarily based on stablecoins, Gauntlet noted.
The scale of the movement is remarkable considering what Gauntlet actually does. Think of it as risk management advice for DeFi: the company helps protocols understand, for example, what percentage of a borrower’s collateral would be at risk of being liquidated if ETH fell 30% overnight. She does not hold any funds herself; instead, it defines the parameters that govern the behavior of lending markets and vaults.
Its TVL is a measure of the capital held in the systems that Gauntlet is charged with protecting. When this figure falls sharply, it may reflect either market tensions or, as in this case, the mechanical end of an incentive program.
Gauntlet, which received a valuation of $1 billion in 2022, currently operates three vaults – essentially pooled custodial accounts where users lock up capital in exchange for a return. The vaults contain USDC, BTC and WETH respectively. The USDC vault is the most liquid, offering an APY of 4.86%, while the others offer between 2% and 2.3%. The outflows could also reflect DeFi traders’ rotation of capital toward higher-yielding alternatives – SOL-based protocols like Jito, for example, currently offer 5.69%.
Gauntlet has already faced significant capital fluctuations. In October 2025, its USDT vaults absorbed a deposit in a single transaction of $775 million – a 40x increase in TVL – and returned to pre-deposit levels within ten days thanks to active reallocation and new additions to the collateral market. The company described this week’s outflows in similar terms, noting that the end of incentive campaigns, token generation events, and changes in market conditions regularly produce fluctuations over short periods in either direction.
“Institutional risk managers manage these events,” the company said in a statement to CoinDesk. “Work to maintain rates, preserve capital provided to coffers and adapt to market conditions.”
Oliver Knight contributed reporting to this story.
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