🔥Gauntlet: Risk governance infrastructure for on-chain finance

DeFi has built lending markets, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. But for institutional capital flows to operate on blockchain, the market still needs an important layer of infrastructure: risk governance.
Gauntlet was founded in 2018 and specializes in developing quantitative models, simulation tools, and self-custody vault systems. On 9/7/2026, the company announced it had completed a $125M Series C round led by SBI Holdings.
🔴How does Gauntlet operate?
Gauntlet uses on-chain data to assess liquidity, price volatility, the quality of collateral assets, and the liquidation capability of DeFi protocols.
The company’s models help determine collateral ratios, supply and borrowing limits, interest-rate mechanisms, and the level of exposure to each market. The system also simulates scenarios such as stablecoins losing their peg, liquidity deteriorating, or asset prices experiencing sharp volatility.
Initially, Gauntlet mainly provided risk advisory services for protocols such as Compound and Uniswap. The company has since expanded into directly managing vaults on Morpho, Aera, Kamino, Drift, and many other ecosystems.
In this model, users deposit assets into a smart contract. Gauntlet acts as a curator, selecting which markets are allowed to receive funding, setting allocation limits, and rebalancing the portfolio based on market conditions.
🔴According to Gauntlet’s announcement, more than $1.6B in assets are being allocated across vaults, and more than 150 fintechs and organizations have integrated the company’s products.
The strategies currently include lending stablecoins, ETH, restaking, delta-neutral, multi-chain vaults, and tokenized real-world assets. Gauntlet combines three roles in a single system: quantitative research, setting risk limits, and directly allocating capital.
-> This helps the company participate more deeply in the operations of on-chain financial markets, rather than only providing recommendations to DAOs.
🔴The role of SBI Holdings
The $125M investment carries strategic significance because SBI owns networks operating in banking, securities, asset management, and digital assets.
Gauntlet plans to use the new funding to expand infrastructure for traditional capital markets, develop stablecoins beyond USD and EUR—including JPY and MXN—while also funding new on-chain financial products.
SBI provides institutional networks in Japan and across Asia. Gauntlet provides a risk governance model and vault infrastructure. This combination reflects the trend of moving traditional asset allocation and management activities onto blockchain.
🔴Risks of the model
Clearly, a risk governance system cannot completely eliminate DeFi risk.
Vaults still depend on smart contracts, oracles, market liquidity, collateral asset quality, and the curator’s decisions. Multi-chain strategies also increase the number of protocols and infrastructure layers that capital flows must rely on.
Self-custody helps reduce custody-related risks, but it does not guarantee assets against technical incidents, liquidity loss, or extreme volatility.
Gauntlet is shifting from being a consulting company to a layer that manages on-chain capital. The company’s position will depend on its ability to control losses during crises, the effectiveness of its vaults, and the level of acceptance from financial institutions.