Gains Network
Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.
Gains Network builds decentralized trading products, best known for its gTrade perpetuals platform, where depositor vaults stand on the other side of trader profit and loss. It held $10.2 million across Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, MegaETH, and ApeChain at the 2026-08-15 survey. The registry rejects it on size: one practice advising 100 households moves $1M to $8M into a venue on the same research, and below $100M TVL that book becomes the exit crush. Size alone decides it, whatever the protocol’s quality. At size, vaults whose return depends on traders losing would need that exposure underwritten explicitly.
- Independently reproducible TVL sustains at least $100M for 30 days, triggering full vault-level derivatives-counterparty review
The research file
Product and class applicability
Gains documents its ERC-4626 gToken collateral vaults as the counterparty to gTrade positions: trader losses enter the vault, trader wins are paid from it, and trading fees accrue to it. That derivatives-counterparty mechanism requires full underwriting at scale, but no more specific shared dossier displaces the v1 below-materiality rule at current size.
Current observation and perimeter
The DefiLlama API read on 2026-08-15 reported approximately $10.2M across Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, MegaETH and ApeChain and classified Gains as derivatives. ApeChain is added to the registry perimeter; the independently tracked aggregate remains far below $100M.
Control, loss and exit applicability
Vault share price incorporates fees and open trader PnL, so depositor principal is exposed when traders win. Gains describes epoch-based withdrawal requests whose lock is one, two or three epochs depending on collateralization; a missed withdrawal window requires a new request. Exit therefore depends on collateral ratio, oracle-updated PnL, epoch processing and available vault assets.
Why the class rule decides
The shared v1 below-materiality dossier controls at approximately $10.2M and does not validate the counterparty design. Reopen after TVL is independently reproducible at or above $100M for 30 days, then underwrite each collateral vault’s trader exposure, collateral ratio, oracle and governance authority, caps, fees, audits, incidents, chain dependencies, withdrawal epochs and losses under one-sided profitable-trader stress.
Sources
The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.
- Gains Network — gToken vault documentation · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
Supports: ERC-4626 vaults, trader counterparty, fee and PnL flows, collateral ratio, oracle epochs, withdrawal locks - Gains Network — current FAQ · primary · accessed 2026-08-15
Supports: vault counterparty role, trader wins and losses, protocol mechanism - DefiLlama — Gains Network survey record · secondary · accessed 2026-08-15
Supports: current TVL, five-chain perimeter, chain-level TVL, derivatives category
Inherited controls
The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.
| Chain | Verdict | Grade | Control constraint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum One | Approved · limits | hybrid | a single sequencer orders >99% of transactions and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts on a ~7-day timelock. |
| Base | Approved · limits | hybrid | Coinbase — one regulated US company — operates the only sequencer, and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts within ~7 days. |
| Polygon PoS | Rejected | hybrid | a public validator set orders transactions, but a 5-of-9 multisig can instantly upgrade staking and canonical bridge contracts, while a 5-of-8 controls custom child tokens. |