Yahoo Finance Crypto Firm Gauntlet Valued at $1B Following Latest Funding Round
Key Insights:
Gauntlet has just raised $23.8 million in a Series B round.
The firm offers data and risk analysis for DeFi platforms.
It aims to scale the platform to operate on multiple networks.
On March 14, the company said that it had raised $23.8 million in a Series B round led by Ribbit Capital. Other investors included previous contributors Polychain Capital and Paradigm.
Gauntlet plans to use the capital injection to fund hiring and expansion into new areas such as gaming.
Gauntlet received its first seed investment of $2.9 million from Coinbase Ventures and several other participants in 2018. The crypto quant company raised a further $4.4 million two years later.
According to Bloomberg, Gauntlet has 32 employees, mainly in New York City. It is deeply involved in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space with leading platforms, including Aave (AAVE) and Compound (COMP), which pay the firm $5 million per year. Gauntlet is also heavily involved in Uniswap (UNI) governance.
Billion Dollar Valuation
Bloomberg reported that the firm has now been valued at $1 billion, adding to the lengthening list of crypto unicorns.
According to co-founder Tarun Chitra, Gauntlet products offer a “stress test” type environment to ensure financial institutions are avoiding excessive risks. It does this continuously for DeFi platforms, he said.
The platform runs algorithms using data from cryptocurrency exchanges to help DeFi platforms select optimal lending and collateral levels. Chitra acknowledged that data processing was becoming more complex, adding that they are investing in the platform to scale to “as many chains as possible.”
In recent years, the demand for reliable data has surged, with some DeFi protocols touting insane yields, often in triple figures. Blockchain analytics firms Dune Analytics and Nansen have raised millions from crypto venture firms in recent months.
Referring to these high DeFi yields, Chitra added:
“They don’t tell you where the yield is coming from, and you can only figure it out by analyzing the users and the mechanism involved. When we work with a protocol, we do as much diligence on them as they do on us.”
DeFi Ecosystem Outlook
The total value locked in the DeFi ecosystem, which is often viewed as a measure of market health, is currently $198.5 billion, according to DeFi Llama.
It has declined 22% from its early December all-time high of $255 billion, but a lot of that can be attributed to declines in the underlying crypto asset prices as markets have also been down-trending this year.
This article was originally posted on FX Empire
