Last week, our Countdown To Breakpoint series brought us to the social side of the ecosystem with Three Teams To Connect With At Breakpoint, where we offered anyone reading the chance to request (via a form) to meet with OnRe, Squads, and Lulo at the conference.
If you read last week’s blog, you’ll see that each team is prioritizing collaboration in their event strategy. From conference booths to the most private side events, Breakpoint is all about bringing builders together to find new ways to collaborate and grow the ecosystem together.
This week, we’re aligning with Breakpoint’s theme of collaboration, bringing a spotlight to two standout partnerships that we see as more than a vanity co-marketing attention grab. If you’re heading to Breakpoint in two weeks, these are the high-intention, high-impact type of deals to focus on in Abu Dhabi.
Kamino × Gauntlet
Kamino is heading to Breakpoint on the back of an extraordinary past 18 months of progress, in which they’ve proven themselves to be Solana’s go-to lend/borrow venue (highlighted previously in our Four Charts To Watch blog).
Of that progress, a recent highlight is Kamino’s partnership with Gauntlet. Gauntlet is a research and risk modelling firm that develops data-driven strategies for DeFi protocols. Its simulation platform runs thousands of agent-based scenarios to help lending markets stay stable during volatility, adjust risk parameters, and respond to changing market conditions. Today, they support major DeFi protocols such as Aave and Compound, which together secure Billions in TVL.
Kicking off the partnership, Gauntlet launched its vault-curation strategies on Kamino, introducing two new lending vaults at release: USDC Prime and SOL Balanced.
“Deploying our vaults on Kamino Lend and Solana is the next step in our mission to build institutional-grade yield opportunities across DeFi." - Gauntlet
The move extends Gauntlet’s mission to bring institutional-grade yield products to DeFi, now powered by Kamino’s unified lending and leverage infrastructure. Gauntlet’s USDC Prime Vault was also onboarded to Kamino Season 5, where depositors can earn 300,000 vested KMNO per week. The incentive program supports early adoption while Gauntlet’s curation engine manages dynamic allocations, real-time risk monitoring, and automated risk-off protections across the vaults.Built on more than seven years of risk modeling and $2 billion in assets stewarded across major DeFi protocols, Gauntlet’s curated vaults offer passive access to institutional-level strategies without requiring users to actively manage positions or market exposure.
The team noted that Solana’s throughput and Kamino’s expanding liquidity base make the platform an ideal foundation for scaling their curation framework, which has been refined over nearly two years of vault management.
Since deployment in September, the vault has grown to over $126M supplied, with utilization holding steady around 83%. Over the past two months, supply APY has more than doubled, rising from roughly 5.5% to more than 11.5%, and the vault has already generated $434,381 in interest for depositors.
Squads × Coinbase
In August, Squads inked a milestone partnership with Coinbase to standardize USDC as the primary operating asset across Squads’ product suite, including Altitude, Grid, and Fuse.
Altitude is built around USDC as its primary balance and settlement layer, giving teams a unified way to hold, move, and manage capital. Grid extends that standard into the developer layer, allowing builders to embed stablecoin-native accounts directly into their applications. Fuse carries the same standard to the end-user layer, enabling individuals to spend and manage USDC through a consumer-grade financial interface.
The decision builds on real, measurable usage. Squads has already processed over $5 billion in stablecoin transfers and secures more than $2.2 billion in stablecoins, with over $1 billion denominated in USDC, representing close to 15% of Solana’s total USDC supply.
Beyond product integration, the partnership is about setting primitives that other teams can safely build on. As Coinbase expands USDC liquidity through initiatives like its Stablecoin Bootstrap Fund, and as Squads standardizes its internal stack, a dependable, builder-first stablecoin standard is beginning to take shape across the network.
Squads now heads into Breakpoint with the strongest momentum the team has experienced to date, on the back of hundreds of organizations onboarded in recent months. Squads tells us their focus in Abu Dhabi will be on demonstrating how Altitude and Grid create a stable, secure, and global operating environment for teams running on USDC. The goal is to show what a unified stablecoin standard looks like in practice and how that standard can begin to define onchain financial operations at scale.
Let's Shape Your Next Home-Run Partnership
The featured partnerships represent long-term commitments to the type of meaningful collaboration that drives our industry forward. The more institutional-grade foundations that are built, many through similar partnerships, the more confidence builders and operators will have to deploy serious products onchain.
At Breakpoint, we are putting this belief into practice by opening up our network to founders and operators who want to move faster. If you are looking to meet the right people who may have been in your shoes or are the right fit for a partnership at your current business stage, stop by the RockawayX lounge and ask for a warm introduction.
More details coming soon.
