Key Takeaways
Gauntlet Applied Research (GAR) is the leading risk management and protocol optimization partner in DeFi, working with major protocols including Compound, Uniswap, NEAR, and Decibel. With eight years of experience across market cycles, our work spans protocol optimization, risk management, and governance.
The GAR approach combines deep knowledge of cryptoeconomics, mechanism design, and traditional finance to deliver data-driven systems that reduce systemic risk, enhance protocol stability, and accelerate sustainable growth.
As institutional adoption accelerates onchain, risk management and growth optimization will become critical competitive advantages in 2026. Below are key GAR highlights from 2025.
Expert risk management for lending and perpetual futures DEX clients
Compound Finance
GAR has partnered with Compound for over five years, supporting the $2B+ lending protocol through safeguarding markets, maximizing capital efficiency, and optimizing incentive spend. In 2025, we renewed our partnership to provide 24/7 monitoring and comprehensive risk management across 28 Comet deployments on seven Compound-supported chains.
Our simulation-driven models continuously optimize parameters, including borrow/liquidation collateral factors, supply caps, and interest rate curves that balance capital efficiency with protocol solvency.
Decibel
We're partnering with Decibel, a perps DEX on Aptos, to design and validate a robust risk engine that supports a healthy trading ecosystem. Our team leverages proprietary simulation and stress-testing models to evaluate protocol behavior across a wide range of market conditions, including extreme volatility and liquidity shocks.
Driving ecosystem growth through incentive optimization
In 2025, GAR optimized $48M in incentives across major DeFi protocols, building data-driven and dynamic rewards mechanisms to consistently deliver deep liquidity and healthy volumes with minimal wasted spend.
Uniswap
We continued our long-term partnership with the Uniswap Foundation to establish foundational liquidity for Unichain and Uniswap v4. We optimized $32M in incentives across dozens of Unichain and Uniswap v4 markets, driving sustainable liquidity through rigorous data-driven modeling and analytics, which informed biweekly adjustments to budget allocations.
The incentive campaigns generated LP revenue well in excess of incentive spend, and attracted $62B in cumulative volume across Unichain markets.
Defining a new era in onchain governance and network security
NEAR
In 2025, GAR partnered with NEAR to launch House of Stake (HoS), an innovative approach to Governance through a vote locking mechanism. First proposed in 2024, our work encompassed governance mechanisms, architecture, funding structures, tokenomics, and other key design elements.
The first NEAR HoS rewards campaign went live in December, with 3,737,490 NEAR locked in HoS and 10,714 NEAR rewards available to claim.
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