Tarun Chitra is the co-founder and CEO of Gauntlet, a DeFi-native quantitative research firm that specializes in optimizing protocol growth economics and risk-adjusted return. ‍Gauntlet’s research team, led by Tarun, uses formal math to describe the economic interactions among protocols within crypto’s sprawling DeFi ecosystem, and quantitative optimization to tune their configurations. Tarun also founded Aera, an onchain, continuously rebalancing treasury-management protocol, built around the need for DAOs and onchain funds to solve the treasury-management trilemma of efficient strategic alignment, active management, and decentralization. He invests in fintech and blockchain companies through his fund Robot Ventures, and is a biweekly contributor on “The Chopping Block,” a crypto-investor podcast. Prior to founding Gauntlet, Tarun worked in high-frequency trading at Vatic Labs and was a scientific programmer at D. E. Shaw Research. He holds a BA in mathematics and BS in applied physics, both from Cornell University.