DeFi risk management giant Gauntlet sees $380 million exit as OKX crypto campaign ends

Gauntlet's total value locked (TVL) has fallen sharply over the past seven days, sliding 22.84% to $1.325 billion and wiping out roughly $380 million from a week-ago peak around $1.72 billion, according to DeFiLlama data.

“DeFi risk management giant Gauntlet sees $380 million exit as OKX crypto campaign ends Gauntlet noted that deposits are now back to same levels before the campaign, and has navigated large capital swings before due to incentive campaign endings, airdrops, and shifts in market conditions which regularly produce short-period swings in either direction”

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The decline accelerated on Thursday, with a single-day drop of 7.57%.

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The firm attributes the move primarily to the end of OKX's pre-deposit campaign on Katana, noting that the outflows are predominantly stablecoins rotating out of incentive-driven vaults.

Gauntlet says the outflows reflect the mechanical end of incentive programs rather than market stress, and notes that incentive campaigns and token events can create sharp, short-lived TVL swings.

In October 2025, its USDT vaults absorbed a $775 million single-transaction deposit — a 40x TVL increase — and recovered to pre-deposit levels within ten days through active reallocation and new collateral market additions.

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"Institutional risk managers manage through these events," the firm said, adding that they are working to maintain rates, preserve capital supplied to vaults, and adjust to market conditions.

Gauntlet, which received a $1 billion valuation in 2022, currently manages three vaults—USDC, BTC, and WETH.

“DeFi risk management giant Gauntlet sees $380 million exit as OKX crypto campaign ends Gauntlet noted that deposits are now back to same levels before the campaign, and has navigated large capital swings before due to incentive campaign endings, airdrops, and shifts in market conditions which regularly produce short-period swings in either direction”

@coindesk

The USDC vault is the most liquid, offering an APY of 4.86%, while the BTC and WETH vaults offer between 2% and 2.3%.

The outflows could reflect DeFi traders rotating capital to higher-yielding alternatives, such as SOL-based protocols like Jito, which currently offer 5.69%.

Gauntlet does not hold funds itself; instead, it sets the parameters that govern how lending markets and vaults behave, and its TVL measures the capital within systems it safeguards, while it also helps protocols understand exposure, such as what percentage of a borrower's collateral would be at risk of liquidation if ETH fell 30% overnight.

OpenClaw developers are being targeted on GitHub with a phishing scam offering fake CLAW token giveaways worth $5,000 that lead to wallet-draining sites.

The phishing pages closely imitate the real OpenClaw site but add prompts to connect major crypto wallets like MetaMask, WalletConnect and Trust Wallet, enabling malicious transactions once access is granted.

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The campaign follows a pattern of crypto scams leveraging OpenClaw's name, after founder Peter Steinberger briefly banned crypto discussion on the project's Discord when a fake token reached a $16 million market cap.