Gauntlet

Founded in 2018 as a simulation business, the firm has built every product since on the same engine. Agent based simulation runs across each market a vault touches, financial simulation engines conduct real time stress testing, and parameter updates are derived automatically from the model output. Curation without the simulation would be a person reading yield rates, which is precisely the alternative the firm positions against. Aera, the white label infrastructure, is sold explicitly as vaults backed by the risk engine, so even the infrastructure product is a wrapper around the models.

The controls are well described, and they are model derived rather than human. The published curation methodology names each constraint and its position in the execution path. Allocation sizes are capped at what the simulations indicate a market can safely absorb. Before exposure is taken, continuous liquidity checks confirm that decentralized exchanges could support potential liquidations without significant market disruption.

Utilization is monitored to prevent over leverage, and strategies are separated into stated risk tiers, with each tranche kept to its own risk target as conditions move. Those are binding limits on autonomous action, published rather than asserted, and a legitimate oversight design. The limit is what lies outside them.

Rebalancing runs continuously on capital with no described human override, no circuit breaker for anomalous or stale inputs, and no stated procedure for when simulation output and market conditions diverge.

Process disclosure is thorough, and it is still not evidence about the models. The published VaultBook sets out curation frameworks, risk assessment processes and vault structures, along with the specific actions taken as curator across three venues. A separate methodology paper names the working components. Liquidity sufficiency is checked before exposure, and yield is analyzed across rate levels and curve shape.

Utilization is managed against over leverage, and capital is reallocated for risk adjusted yield. The application gives allocators live performance and risk metrics, monthly reporting sets out the rationale behind the largest positions, and each vault carries a published risk rating. An institution can therefore follow the reasoning and watch the positions. It cannot validate the engine.

There is no back test, no calibration evidence and no statement of the simulation's assumptions or known failure modes. Nor is there a comparison of modeled to realized outcomes, or an ISO 42001 certification.

A long track record, hard numbers, and a party with substantial money at stake having done the diligence. The firm modelled risk parameters for Aave, Compound and Maker from 2020, which is a seven year operating history in a market where most participants are younger than their first drawdown.

Current scale is stated consistently across the firm's own material and independent trade press at more than $1.5 billion curated across more than thirty vaults, with $35 billion monitored for partners. Deployments are named and described rather than listed: 500,000 users reached through KAST's earn programme, yield integrated inside the Uniswap app.

SBI Holdings, a listed Japanese financial group, was the sole investor in a $125 million round in July 2026, following a Series B at a $1 billion valuation led by Ribbit Capital. Independent coverage is broad. The gap is realised performance: no published record of vault returns against modelled expectations, and no disclosure of losses.

Gauntlet rates the vaults it curates, the first of two overlapping positions. It assigns an A plus to D risk rating to those vaults, so the rater and the rated are one entity, and nothing describes what separates the rating judgment from the commercial interest in the rated product attracting deposits. The second overlap is older and sharper in its implications.

The firm built its reputation setting risk parameters for lending protocols and now runs vaults that allocate capital into markets on those same venues, so a party influencing the rules of a market can also be a participant exposed to it. Neither arrangement is denied and neither is described.

Nothing states what information barrier exists, whether parameter advisory work and curation are staffed separately, or how a conflict between the interest of a protocol being advised and the depositors in a vault would be resolved.

The privacy exposure is indirect but real. Strategies are distributed through partners' consumer surfaces, including a neobank earn program reaching 500,000 users and yield inside a widely used wallet. End user data touches the arrangement even though the firm itself allocates rather than onboards. No privacy policy detail, data processing agreement, subprocessor list or retention schedule is published.

Nothing describes what the firm receives from those distribution partners, what it retains, or whether allocation and performance data attributable to an institution's own book is segregated from the data informing strategies serving others.

Gauntlet names its security partners and what each one does, but has no audited attestation. A dedicated security page sets out the stack. It names zeroShadow for incident response, Hypernative for onchain threat prevention and detection, and Chainalysis for tracing funds. The Security Alliance intelligence group is also named, and the scope of what is protected is stated in dollar terms. Naming the stack and its function goes beyond the usual silence, and a buyer can verify it.

No SOC report, ISO 27001 certification, penetration test attestation or trust center document is published. The claim to be the only curator with an institutional grade security posture is a superlative rather than a credential, and nothing published substantiates the comparison.

The activity has moved a long way from where it started, and the firm has no financial license or registration. Selecting markets, sizing positions and rebalancing capital across stated risk tiers on behalf of allocators is, in traditional markets, discretionary investment management and generally authorized as such. That is a statement of fact, not a legal conclusion. The structural reason the perimeter does not obviously attach is that the vaults are non custodial.

The firm also publishes an A plus to D risk rating without any credit rating agency registration. A listed and regulated Japanese financial group took the entire most recent funding round, which says more about the investor's appetite than about the firm's own supervisory standing.

Concentration is the question that matters at this firm's size. No fairness testing, model bias assessment or concentration analysis is published. The firm is described as the largest curator on the venue where much of its capital sits, and its models decide which markets receive liquidity across a substantial share of one lending ecosystem.

A systematic preference embedded in the simulation propagates as a funding advantage for the markets it favors and a funding drought for those it does not. Nothing addresses whether that concentration has been examined, whether the models are tested for correlated behavior with other curators running similar approaches, or what happens to a market the models consistently decline.

No liability position, loss sharing arrangement, error rate or recourse route is published. The economics run one way and the published material does not acknowledge it: the firm earns a fee for allocating capital it does not custody, while a depositor whose funds were placed by the models into a market that fails bears that loss directly.

Nothing states what the firm is responsible for if a simulation was wrong, if a cap was set too high, or if a rebalance executed into deteriorating conditions. No record of vault losses or drawdowns is published, and no correction or appeal path exists for an allocator disputing a curation decision after the fact.

No model provider, family, version or hosting arrangement is disclosed. The simulation engine appears to be built in house, which would be a meaningful supply chain fact in a market where most vendors assemble third party components, and the firm never states it, so a buyer cannot distinguish proprietary work from undisclosed dependency.

A recent reference to growing operations with artificial intelligence support is left entirely unspecified, including whether any external model provider touches allocation decisions or is confined to internal workflow.

The product is embedded inside other companies' products rather than consumed alongside them. Aera is white label vault infrastructure that institutions use to power their own branded yield offerings on the firm's risk engine. Curated yield is built directly into the Uniswap web application and wallet, curated vaults are reachable through Elwood's interface, and KAST's earn program runs on one of the firm's stablecoin strategies.

Underneath, strategies operate across Morpho, Pendle, Drift and Symbiotic. They run on Ethereum mainnet, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon, and the firm is described as Morpho's largest curator. Named security providers are wired into operations alongside the allocation stack.

The on chain half of the picture is legible by construction: strategies operate on named public networks and positions are inspectable. The off chain infrastructure has no published hosting regions, residency commitments or tenancy model. The white label infrastructure is described as composable and customizable without stating what a deploying institution controls. An institution in a jurisdiction with data localization obligations would find nothing addressing where the simulation infrastructure, the data pipeline or the application actually run.

The firm's revenue is a fee on capital it allocates, and its published material has no fee schedule for curation. The fees are not hidden. Vault level fee parameters are set on chain and inspectable per vault by anyone who knows where to look, so the position is undocumented rather than concealed. It is still an omission.

An allocator comparing curators would have to reconstruct the economics from contract state rather than read them from published material, and nothing states whether fees vary by strategy, by tier or by institutional relationship.

Breadth of buyer type is real and well evidenced. More than 150 fintechs and institutions are integrated, and the named ones span distinct categories rather than repeating one. The stablecoin neobank KAST runs an earn program that reaches 500,000 users, and the decentralized exchange Uniswap carries curated yield inside its app and wallet. The institutional trading platform Elwood and the wallet infrastructure provider Privy are named.

So are the node infrastructure firm Blockdaemon and the stablecoin native network Tempo. Scale is stated consistently at more than $1.5 billion curated across more than thirty vaults on three networks, with a further $35 billion monitored for partners. Geographic and currency expansion is under way beyond dollar and euro strategies into peso and yen denominated stablecoins, and a listed Japanese financial group took the entire most recent funding round.