Today, two years after that initial unveiling and one year since vaults became publicly available, we remain vigilant in proactively strengthening our security. In this post, we’ll cover how we approach security and strive to continuously enhance the security posture of Aera vaults.

Our Multi-Layered Security Framework

Our approach to security relies on a combination of external security partnerships, internal safeguards, and ongoing vigilance and refinement.

Designed with Security in Mind

Aera vaults are designed to enable self-custody of assets, a foundational principle that helps minimize risk.

A vault owner always retains full control of their assets, which they can withdraw at any time without a delay or cooling-off period. This self-custodial design means that no Aera team member, nor third-party Guardian, has access to a vault’s underlying assets.

Self-custody of Aera vaults is enabled by the user’s ownership of both the vault’s asset registry and hooks contracts. These are used to limit what assets and protocols the vault can interact with and the range of operations that can be triggered by Guardians.

External Security Audits & Partnerships

We collaborate with industry-leading external partners to audit our protocol. Our security audits are thorough, iterative, and cover every major protocol update:

• Spearbit Audits: Spearbit, a distributed network of industry-leading security researchers, audited both v1 and v2 of our protocol (here’s its most recent audit). Our team addressed all relevant issues identified by Spearbit prior to the launch of v2.

• OpenZeppelin Integration Audit: We also mandate additional audits for specialized integrations to ensure no vulnerabilities go unnoticed. OpenZeppelin, for example, audited our LlamaPay integration.

We also run an active bug bounty program with Immunefi, encouraging responsible disclosures. This program is continuously calibrated based on TVL growth, ensuring it scales with the risks and stakes involved.

Internal Security Procedures

While external audits are crucial, a commitment to security begins internally. We’ve implemented a rigorous internal process designed to proactively catch vulnerabilities and minimize risks.

• Comprehensive Testing: Every patch goes through extensive unit testing, integration testing, and static analysis.

• Internal Auditing: An 18-step internal auditing process (see more below) ensures every code change is evaluated for security risks by a team that includes engineers not responsible for developing the original feature.

• Threat Model: We maintain and regularly update a comprehensive threat model to anticipate and mitigate potential vulnerabilities.

• Active Monitoring: Guardians, like Gauntlet, actively monitor all activity across vaults, as well as macro and micro market conditions, updating Aera’s strategies as needed to properly manage risk.

A Structured Approach to Code Changes

Each update to the Aera protocol follows a detailed process designed to ensure we catch any bugs before new features are shipped.

1. Specification and Threat Modeling: Before writing any code, we develop an Aera Enhancement Proposal (AEP), which outlines the feature specifications and highlights any potential changes to the threat model. This proposal is reviewed by multiple team members to ensure it meets our security standards.

2. Development and Testing: Once the specification is approved, the feature undergoes rigorous development and testing. We maintain 100% unit test coverage, employ various forms of integration testing, and run static analysis tools such as Slither on every commit.

3. Internal Auditing: An internal audit lead is assigned to perform a comprehensive 18-step audit of the code. This process mimics top-tier security companies' procedures, helping us catch as many issues as possible before handing over the code for external auditing. Doing so enables external auditors to focus on the most critical portions of an audit.

4. Test Vaults: After passing internal audits, the code is deployed to production on our own vault, which holds Aera’s own capital. This step ensures that any issues are caught before we ship a new feature with the potential to affect other users’ vaults.

Key Risks and How We Mitigate Them

No protocol or smart contract is without risks, and we believe in transparency about the challenges that exist. Here are a few highlighted risks related to Aera vaults and the steps we take to mitigate them:

• Front-Running Risk: On certain chains and assets, there’s a risk of price manipulation when using Automated Market Makers (AMMs). To minimize this, we use slippage limits and recommend deploying Aera with a trusted guardian.

• Real-Time Response Limits: While our contracts are automated, some unforeseen events (like a loss of parity or hack) may require urgent actions. However, vault owners have direct access to execute necessary functions.

• Guardian Submissions and Collusion: While we have worked hard to mitigate the power of the Guardian role in the contracts, errors in the offchain code (due to errors in data received from an ETL provider, for example) could lead to incorrect parameters being submitted to the vault or a missed submission. Additionally, a vault owner should assign roles carefully in order to avoid conflicts of interest or collusion. In the event of a malicious Guardian, vault owners have the power to stop vault operations at any point and to remove or replace the current Guardian.

• Oracle Quality and Dependencies: We rely on high-quality onchain oracles to safeguard vaults. While we aim for the best oracles, less liquid assets can present higher risk. Moreover, Aera cannot protect against vulnerabilities in DeFi protocols we interact with, so we carefully vet integrations to ensure they are safe and effective.

Conclusion

We’re committed to empowering users with secure, non-custodial solutions for managing their onchain assets. From our rigorous internal and external audits to our comprehensive threat modeling and real-time testing, we take a comprehensive approach to fortifying your Aera vaults.

The nature of our industry requires us to constantly anticipate and investigate new potential threat vectors. Our range of internal testing, external audit, and bug bounty processes ensures a robust security posture as we continue to enhance the Aera protocol and onboard new vault owners.

If you want to learn more about Aera vaults and how they can help streamline management of your onchain assets, please reach out on social media or explore our website.

Recently, Puffer Finance and Swell, two of the largest liquid restaking protocols (dubbed LRTs as they issue liquid restaking tokens), have begun pioneering the use of Aera vaults within the restaking ecosystem, where they, as well as other LRTs and Operators, are facing the challenge of managing large inflows of restaking rewards they anticipate receiving in the form of native network tokens. One of their primary concerns? How to handle large, ongoing volumes of token conversions in the most capital-efficient way possible.

Aera vaults offer a simple, elegant solution to this problem.

What to Do With Restaking Rewards?

Restakers have deposited more than $12 billion into EigenLayer and Symbiotic, the two largest restaking protocols, according to DefiLlama. In theory, LRTs and Operators (i.e., node operators that are delegated restaked assets to deploy) will be looking to earn yield on that $12 billion by spreading it across the dozens of projects that reward restakers for help securing their decentralized networks (known as AVSs on EigenLayer and Networks on Symbiotic).

That’s millions worth of rewards flowing back to these LRTs and Operators, and any other ecosystem participants in a position to receive AVS or Network rewards. It’s expected a large amount of those rewards will arrive in the form of native network tokens.

This expectation has LRT and Operator teams considering questions like:

• Do they want to be long-term holders of every AVS/Network token they receive?

• Will the qualified custodians of our institutional restakers use support native tokens?

• Should they distribute a hodgepodge mix of these native tokens to their restakers?

• Should they converts all these native tokens to a base asset like WETH before distributing them?

• If they convert them, how will they manage converting large volumes of native tokens in such a way that minimizes slippage, doesn’t crash the native token’s price, but maximizes the value they receive?

Questions like these are what led Puffer Finance (behind the pufETH LRT) and Swell (behind rswETH and swBTC) to explore using Aera vaults to manage the flow of their restaking rewards, including automating the claim process; the conversion of native token rewards for base assets like WETH, WBTC or major liquid staking token; and the restaking of rewards for dual staking.

To understand how Aera enables this functionality, we need to explore Aera vaults in more depth.

The Aera Solution

Aera offers non-custodial vaults that can be configured to handle several automated operations while remaining highly responsive to real-time market conditions.

An Aera vault owner can select from a growing number of off-the-shelf treasury management strategies designed to help achieve various goals, such as optimizing yield via levered ETH staking or stablecoin lending, or providing dynamic liquidity provisioning for a protocol’s native token. The vault owner maintains an allowlist containing specific tokens and protocols with which the vault contract can interact. Actions like reallocations can be triggered by recommendations from a third-party “Guardian,” but are limited by the parameters set by the vault owner. (For a deep dive into how Aera works, visit our docs).

Back to restaking rewards. One of Aera’s off-the-shelf strategies is low-liquidity asset reallocation. This strategy was originally designed to enable DAOs to diversify their treasuries out of their native asset with minimal slippage and impact on the native asset’s market price.

By configuring Aera vaults with the low-liquidity asset reallocation strategy, Puffer and Swell can integrate such capabilities within their LRT infrastructure and automate the claim and sale of native AVS and Network token rewards in a capital-efficient way that minimizes slippage and price impact.

Here’s an illustrative diagram of the flow using EigenLayer as an example.

Aera’s Value Goes Beyond Restaking Rewards Management

Aera’s flexibility has the potential to provide utility within the restaking ecosystem beyond an LRT or Operator using an Aera vault to manage rewards. In fact, Swell plans to also use an Aera vault within its recently announced Bitcoin LRT to manage allocations of restaked assets across Networks on Symbiotic.

Anywhere in a system’s architecture where tokens must be managed in such a way to optimize for specific needs and goals, an Aera vault can help reduce the hassle and overhead.

Stay tuned for more as these additional use cases develop.

Set Up an Aera Vault for Your LRT

Aera vaults are shaping up to be a game-changer for managing restaking rewards within the DeFi ecosystem. With their configurable, autonomous, and non-custodial design, Aera vaults enable LRTs and Operators to minimize the complexity of managing restaking rewards while optimizing their portfolios of token holdings.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Aera vaults can provide a streamlined solution to efficiently and effectively manage your restaking rewards, please get in touch.

Onchain treasuries can significantly enhance their long-term financial health and growth potential by deploying stablecoin reserves across lending platforms. Maximizing that yield, however, requires monitoring and rebalancing those stables on an ongoing basis, which is no easy task.

Aera can simplify the process for onchain treasuries. A treasury management protocol incubated by Gauntlet, Aera can automate and optimize a stablecoin-rebalancing strategy, allowing onchain treasuries to enjoy passive yield without the logistical headache that comes with constant manual rebalancing — and, importantly, without giving up custody of their tokens.

Aera Vaults Enable Set-it-and-Forget-it Treasury Strategies

Aera offers a DeFi-native treasury solution that helps vault owners reach their objectives while being non-custodial and highly responsive to real-time market conditions. For a deep dive into how Aera works, check out our docs.

Beyond optimizing for stablecoin yield — the subject of this post — Aera vault owners have the option to configure their vaults with several additional treasury management strategies, mixing and matching as they see fit to achieve their strategic goals, including levered ETH staking, dynamic liquidity provisioning, volatility targeting, and low-liquidity asset diversification.

Breaking Down Aera’s Stablecoin Vault Strategy

Aera vaults using the stablecoin strategy are designed to optimize returns and enhance asset security while maintaining high liquidity (i.e., funds are readily accessible when needed) and operational efficiency.

To achieve these objectives, Aera’s stablecoin strategy can be broken down into three buckets:

• Asset and Protocol Allocation

• Yield Optimization

• Risk Management

Asset and Protocol Allocation

To get started, onchain treasuries can deploy USDC — the first stablecoin supported for this strategy — into a non-custodial Aera vault. The Guardian regularly makes parameter recommendations for each vault based on current rates to maintain desired allocation ratios and adapt to market conditions.

Yield Optimization

To optimize risk-adjusted yield, Aera monitors the supply APYs across Compound, Aave, and Morpho, seeking to maximize risk-adjusted yields in its strategic allocations.

The recommendations deployed by Aera aim to achieve yield optimization by simulating various levels of supply to determine the optimal allocation that maximizes yield while minimizing potential losses due to insolvency. The configuration is flexible and can be adjusted based on the vault owner's specific needs and risk appetite.

Risk Management

In addition to portfolio simulation, Gauntlet (as the Guardian) runs a risk assessment every five minutes to evaluate various risk exposures of a vault’s assets. The assessment monitors market volatility, non-Aera positions that are large enough to move the market, and the quality of collateral being used to borrow supplied USDC.

Each Aera vault has configurable maximum-loss parameters, which are vault-transaction limits that prevent any Guardian transaction recommendation from resulting in a loss of more than a predetermined amount. Such limits are immutably configured by the vault owner. Any limit-breaching transaction recommendation would be automatically reverted by the smart contracts that interact with the vault.

Getting Started with Aera's Stablecoin Vault Strategy

To spin up a vault and begin using the Aera stablecoin strategy, or other available treasury management strategies, please reach out to us on X or explore our website.

Continuing our series on specific asset-allocation strategies enabled via Aera vaults, today we explore levered ETH staking. By using a combination of flash loans and borrowing via a top lending protocol (e.g., Compound, Aave, etc.), we can significantly boost the potential staking rewards earned from the assets in your Aera vault.

How Aera Works

Before we jump into the strategy, a quick refresher on Aera.

Aera offers customizable, non-custodial vaults to DAOs and other onchain treasuries that want to put their idle treasury assets to work.

Any community, team, or other entity with an onchain treasury can deposit that treasury’s assets into a vault, a self-custody smart contract that enables DAOs and treasury managers to always retain control of their funds (visit Aera’s docs for more).

1. DAOs or treasury managers set comprehensive goals aligned with their overall strategy and specify their Aera vault policy, including whitelisting specific assets and protocols with which the vault contract can interact. Aera vaults currently support two types of tokens: ERC20s and ERC4626s (i.e., yield-bearing assets).

2. A third-party Guardian recommends allocations and strategies across approved assets to optimize the use of treasury funds based on real-time market conditions and preset objectives.

3. The vault autonomously executes the most effective asset-allocation and rebalancing recommendations.

4. Aera vaults use price oracles to monitor a treasury’s assets; if certain pre-defined thresholds are met, the vault contract can automatically trigger the exit or deleveraging of a position.

In Aera’s current V2 iteration, Gauntlet is the sole Guardian, which leverages offchain intelligence and its comprehensive experience as an industry-leading risk manager to develop vault recommendations. In future versions, a network of Guardians will compete to provide recommendations that optimize treasury management strategies.

Aera vaults currently support various DeFi strategies, including dynamic liquidity provisioning on DEXs (see our previous post on protocol-owned liquidity and liquidity mining), volatility targeting, low-liquidity asset diversification, yield farming, lending, and — the topic of today’s post — levered ETH staking.

Levered Staking with Aera

Aera’s levered ETH staking strategy aims to optimize a vault’s potential yield using a risk-first approach by using a top lending protocol (e.g., Compound, Aave, etc.) to generate staking rewards through leverage.

The strategy: Use a flash loan to provide leverage and increase the amount of staked ETH from which an Aera vault can earn rewards. Our target is 5x leverage, our reasoning for which we’ll get into later.

Let’s use a basic example in which we have 1 wETH (wrapped ETH) to demonstrate how the strategy works.

With our 1 wETH, we could stake it via Lido and receive 1 wETH worth of Lido’s liquid staking token, stETH, which accrues ETH staking rewards that carry an APY of around 3.15%, as of this writing.

But we can do better with leverage. Here’s how Aera’s levered staking strategy would play out:

1. Flash loan: We’ll start with the same 1 wETH, but we’ll add to it by borrowing 5 wETH with an uncollateralized flash loan via a top lending protocol (e.g., Compound, Aave, etc.). We now have 6 wETH.

2. Acquire wstETH: On the same lending protocol, we swap our 6 wETH for the equivalent value in wstETH, the wrapped version of Lido’s liquid staking token, which accrues the same staking rewards as the unwrapped version we’d receive if we staked directly via Lido’s platform.

3. Borrow against our wstETH: We now collateralize the 6 wETH worth of wstETH, and use it to borrow 5 wETH on the lending protocol.

4. Repay flash loan: We use the borrowed 5 wETH to repay the flash loan. (Flash loans require the entire operation to be atomic — i.e., all transactions need to occur within the same block, or they’ll all fail.)

The result is we have 6 wETH worth of wstETH, supplied as collateral on the lending protocol, and a 5 wETH debt. Our net position value remains 1 wETH.

Why would we do this? Because now we are earning 3.15% on 6 wETH, instead of on 1 wETH, meaning that we are now effectively earning 6 * 3.15%  = 18.9% on our original 1 wETH.

However, we need to factor in the borrowing costs. At the moment, borrow rates for wETH on Aave, for example, are currently 2.57%. So, if we’re borrowing 5 wETH, we’re effectively paying 5 * 2.57% for our 1 wETH position, or ~12.85%. The net of these two positions, though, is still positive and we’re now earning 18.9 - 12.85 = 6.05% on our 1 wETH.

This strategy allows you to leverage your staking rewards, achieving higher returns on your initial investment while managing the associated costs. Vault owners are provided a dashboard where they can review all current and historical daily APYs.

What risks are associated with this strategy?

Like any strategy in DeFi, there are risks associated with Aera’s levered staking strategy.

Besides the typical smart contract risk and possibility of ETH itself losing value, the main risk is if wstETH’s value falls in price relative to wETH.

Today, wstETH’s price generally appreciates regularly due to the underlying design of stETH, with rebasing events only moderately lowering the price. However, stETH has deviated from par in the past, most recently in the summer of 2022 when token holders faced uncertainty in their ability to swap their stETH for ETH (a risk that’s been mitigated in Lido V2 as withdrawals now happen via a smart contract).

That said, there is no guarantee the price of wstETH won’t drastically deviate from that of ETH at some point in the future for other reasons. Gauntlet, Aera’s first Guardian, invests a significant amount of time understanding the exact mechanics of this possibility and simulating possible scenarios that inform the parameter recommendations they make towards lending protocols (this discussion in Aave’s governance forum provides an example).

Gauntlet currently targets 5x leverage based on an assumed loan-to-value ratio of 0.8 — though, maximum LTV is governed by the specific lending protocol’s pool settings — leaving room for a 13% deviation from par while still giving us a roughly 2x increase in staking rewards (at current rates). They recognize a 13% buffer offers the opportunity to take more risk, but they believe there are diminishing returns given the increase in staking rewards to be had.

Get started with Aera

If you want to learn more about Aera vaults and available treasury management strategies, please reach out on social media or explore our website.

Aera Team

Aera is a decentralized treasury management protocol tailored to DAOs and onchain treasuries. Its flexible and customizable architecture allows onchain treasuries to set comprehensive treasury goals aligned with community objectives.

Today, we cover Aera’s unique approach to POL and Liquidity Mining, showcasing how the Aera Guardian role ensures optimal incentive management and liquidity deployment. Through these mechanisms, Aera empowers protocol treasuries to reach their liquidity goals and drive ecosystem growth.

1. How Aera works

2. Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) with Aera

3. Liquidity Mining with Aera

4. Joint Optimization

How Aera Works

Aera offers a DeFi-native treasury solution that supports alignment with community objectives while being highly responsive to real-time market conditions.

DAOs or onchain treasuries access a unique, customizable, non-custodial Aera vault to deposit token reserves. Third-party Guardians, like Gauntlet, submit proposed allocations across a set of approved assets to optimize treasury funds based on market conditions and a pre-set objective function. The vault then autonomously executes transactions after selecting the most effective submission.

Aera vaults can be programmed with specific strategies, such as providing liquidity on DEXs (through POL or Liquidity Mining), participating in yield farming, or lending, all of which aim to optimize returns and support the protocol's liquidity needs.

Vaults are autonomously rebalanced with the support of the Guardian, which leverages off-chain logic to power onchain rebalancing proposals. This supports vault objectives across various market scenarios and time horizons.

Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL) with Aera

Aera facilitates POL strategies by enabling protocols (vault owners) to deploy their assets into customized liquidity vaults.

Guardian’s Role in POL

In the current V2 iteration of Aera, Gauntlet serves as the sole Guardian, leveraging its experience as an industry-leading risk manager. As Guardian, Gauntlet supports several functions, including:

• Rebalancing liquidity to maintain an active price range and adjusting as necessary.

• Dynamically updating the liquidity provided via Aera to a POL strategy to ensure target liquidity and user experience are met while minimizing opportunity cost.

• Monitoring LP positions and trading conditions for DeFi users, ensuring liquidity is effectively deployed to support user goals.

Using off-chain monitoring and logic, which is then executed onchain within Aera’s constrained action parameters, allows the Guardian to support risk-aware, responsive management of POL positions in a permissionless and non-custodial manner.

Methodology

1. Liquidity Provision: The protocol deploys a portion of its treasury, including its native tokens and a paired token (usually USDC or ETH), into an Aera vault.

2. Strategy Execution: The Aera vault automatically executes the strategy by depositing the native token/paired token into a liquidity pool. This action increases available liquidity, allowing protocol users to swap the native tokens with lower slippage.

3. Trading Fees: Liquidity providers earn a portion of the trading fees generated from the swaps deposited in the Aera vault.

4. Reinvestment and Growth: The fees collected can be reinvested in the liquidity pool to further increase liquidity or can be used to fund other strategic initiatives within the ecosystem.

5. Monitoring and Adjustment: Gauntlet, alongside the protocol, monitors liquidity depth, volume, and overall market response. Vault owners can (with Guardian support) adjust the target liquidity depths and strategy as needed to maintain a healthy ecosystem and ensure the stability of their native tokens.

Liquidity Mining with Aera

Aera integrates with DEX Liquidity Mining providers, enabling users to claim incentives that are parameterized using off-chain logic. As such, Aera operationally enables LPs to earn incentives in a decentralized and permissionless manner.

Liquidity Mining spend is automatically and continuously deployed to meet a protocol’s needs. Guardian-submitted transactions optimize spending to support objectives, powering budgets and pool allocations. This enables effective incentive management across various market conditions and scenarios.

Guardian's role in Liquidity Mining incentives

In the current V2 iteration of Aera, Gauntlet serves as the sole Guardian and leverages its experience as an incentives manager for protocols like Uniswap and Arbitrum.

As Guardian, Gauntlet oversees several functions, including:

• Setting overall incentive budgets to drive protocol goals.

• Determining optimal incentive allocation across allow-listed pools.

• Monitoring the impact of incentive spend on liquidity and users to ensure goals are maximally supported.

As with POL, the Guardian uses off-chain monitoring and logic, which is executed onchain within Aera’s constrained action parameters. This allows Guardians (such as Gauntlet) to support the optimization of incentive spend in a permissionless and non-custodial way.

Methodology

1. Instantiation: The protocol (vault owner) decides on a maximum budget for its incentives program and accordingly deploys its native tokens to Aera. If no incentive budget exists, the Guardian can support the development of an optimal one.

2. Deployment: The Guardian deploys capital to a pool to execute the vault strategy.

3. Monitoring and Optimization: The Guardian, alongside the protocol, will monitor the impact and progress of the incentives program over time, assessing how it impacts depth, volume, and other market responses. They adjust the target budgets and eligibility of incentives to maximize impact and minimize wasted spend.

Joint Optimization

Some protocols may consider running a joint strategy that combines Liquidity Mining incentives and POL. Aera can support dynamic allocation between the two — the protocol can specify a joint budget for POL and incentives to be used over a determined time period.

Guardian Role in Joint Optimization

Guardians can dynamically allocate a budget between incentive spend and POL to maximize user goals, depending on market conditions and the observed impact of both POL and Liquidity Mining.

Methodology

1. Initial Provision: The protocol deploys a portion of its treasury to balance POL against Liquidity Mining over a given period.

2. Strategy Execution: Guardians use off-chain logic to determine an initial proposed allocation between incentive spending, POL, and earning yield on unspent/used tokens.

3. Monitoring and Adjustment: Guardians submit proposed rebalancing transactions among POL, LM, and yield strategies, depending on hitting protocol objectives, in response to changing market conditions and observed impact of earlier instantiations of the program.

Onchain treasuries have a wealth of opportunities to enhance their treasury management through Aera. POL and Liquidity Mining strategies serve the important function of deepening onchain liquidity and driving protocol growth. Doing so with a keen eye for risk management is seamless through an Aera vault.

We invite you to reach out to us on social media or explore our website at aera.finance, if you want to learn more about Aera vaults and available treasury management strategies.

Aera Team

Liquidity Mining incentivizes participants to provide liquidity in exchange for rewards, usually native tokens. POL, in contrast, represents a shift in approach whereby protocols themselves maintain liquidity reserves, ensuring healthy markets and reducing reliance on external providers.

Today, we explore the importance of onchain liquidity for protocol growth and discuss the mechanics, benefits, and challenges of both POL and Liquidity Mining. We’ll cover:

1. Onchain liquidity and protocol growth

2. Liquidity Mining

3. Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL)

4. Choosing between Liquidity Mining and POL

Onchain liquidity and protocol growth

What is onchain liquidity?

Onchain liquidity is the liquidity available to trade directly on a blockchain. Liquidity is typically made available through decentralized exchanges (DEXs), enabling traders to buy and sell tokens directly onchain without using an external, centralized venue. Deeper DEX liquidity drives improved price execution for traders lowering the cost to buy or sell a token.

Why should a protocol care about on-chain liquidity?

Increased DeFi adoption

Low DEX liquidity can hinder the adoption of a native token across DeFi. Lending and perpetuals protocols may rely on liquid onchain markets to support functions like liquidations. Without corresponding DEX liquidity, the ability to support a native token through a DeFi ecosystem can be extremely limited.

Entry into the token ecosystem

Low liquidity may also have a chilling effect on DEX traders interested in buying and holding a protocol’s native token due to high slippage preventing traders from obtaining large positions cheaply. Increasing the liquidity provided on DEXs facilitates new market entrants in a token ecosystem encouraging protocol growth.

Increased token price stability

Thin liquidity can result in larger trades having an outsized price impact, known as slippage. One large sell order on a DEX may blow through multiple price ranges resulting in price instability and increased uncertainty within the market. Robust liquidity can enable DEXs to absorb these larger unexpected sales and prevent unnecessary price volatility.

DEX liquidity flywheel

For tokens with low liquidity, bootstrapping liquidity on a DEX can generate a flywheel effect driving long-term growth and value for native tokens. Generally, more liquidity drives more transactions, which generates additional fees to liquidity providers (LPs) for that token. This can attract more liquidity in the future, generating a flywheel that builds token adoption and viability.

Liquidity Mining

Liquidity Mining is a common strategy for bootstrapping onchain liquidity. It functions by incentivizing users, often referred to as liquidity providers (LPs), to deposit their cryptocurrency assets into a liquidity pool. These pools facilitate decentralized trading, lending, and other financial activities. Incentives offered to LPs are typically in the form of additional tokens.

Liquidity Mining amplifies capital inflows by offering direct financial incentives for participation. It can also lead to a significant inflow of transaction volume based on spending. As our research has shown, Liquidity Mining can boost daily liquidity increases by high multiples per $1 of incentives, varying greatly on market conditions and the profile of the supplied token.

Advantages of Liquidity Mining

High Leverage

The key advantage of liquidity mining is obtaining high leverage for your spending. One dollar in incentives can generate thousands of dollars in liquidity for relevant pools, a relatively small spend for an outsized impact on DEX liquidity.

Disadvantages of Liquidity Mining

Fleeting Liquidity

While Liquidity Mining can drive a rapid increase in total value locked (TVL), this TVL often does not prove to be “sticky.” Once the Liquidity Mining program ends and rates normalize, “mercenary” LPs are likely to pull their liquidity in search of another mining program, potentially destabilizing the protocol and negatively affecting TVL.

Unstable Liquidity

During market turbulence, LPs may withdraw their liquidity despite incentives when liquidity is most in demand. This results in liquidity leaving DEX pools the moment it is most important.

Cost

Liquidity mining incentives are expensive, given they are unreclaimable payments directly to LPs. These LPs generally sell out of these native tokens, putting significant downward pressure on token price and shrinking a protocol’s treasury over time.

Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL)

Protocol-Owned Liquidity, or POL, is a native derivative of Liquidity Mining and refers to the strategic acquisition and management of onchain liquidity by a protocol itself rather than relying solely on external liquidity providers. This approach offers protocols more direct control over a portion of their market's liquidity, ensuring stability, reducing slippage, and generating revenue from trading fees.

Similar to Liquidity Mining, POL enables a protocol to kickstart trading activity or maintain a baseline level of liquidity without depending on external incentives to attract LPs. Unlike Liquidity Mining, where users are motivated to contribute liquidity in exchange for rewards, POL places the responsibility on the protocol itself to act as the LP, utilizing its own resources to ensure market liquidity.

Advantages of POL

Stable Liquidity

POL, provided directly from the protocol, is immune to skittish LPs reacting to market events. Liquidity deposited into a POL position is guaranteed to be there in a market crisis and can act as liquidity of last resort, even when third-party LPs flee.

A protocol may decide to employ a POL strategy if it wants to control and maintain consistency over the liquidity levels in relevant markets. In times of market uncertainty, a protocol can be confident that liquidity is available when truly necessary.

Generating Revenue

POL generates revenue for the protocol in the form of LP fees. Dissimilar to Liquidity Mining, where incentives are spent once and gone forever, POL will usually increase in value over time as LP revenue is generated and can be withdrawn once it is no longer needed. This turns Liquidity Mining, which has historically been a cost center, into a revenue center for a protocol.

Disadvantages of POL

Treasury Opportunity Cost

The strategy may tie up a large portion of the treasury in POL positions in the short run due to its reduced leverage. One dollar in POL generates $1 in liquidity for a given pool. This means that throughout the duration of a POL deposit, the treasury is not generating yield through other sources and faces the opportunity cost of holding tokens directly, often referred to as impermanent loss or loss versus rebalancing (LVR). While this is not a direct cost in the sense that Liquidity Mining is lost spend, it is a cost as the capital tied up in POL could be otherwise used for potentially higher-yield generating activities.

Choosing between POL and Liquidity Mining

The core difference between POL and Liquidity Mining is a “rent versus buy” decision. POL enables a protocol to buy its own LP positions directly, whereas Liquidity Mining allows a protocol to rent liquidity from third parties.

Liquidity Mining is an effective solution for protocols looking to bootstrap a very large amount of liquidity quickly and are less concerned with the cost and price impact of their spending or the potential for liquidity to flee in adverse market conditions.

POL, on the other hand, is a powerful solution for protocols with a large diversified treasury interested in providing stable liquidity for their users during periods of market crisis while earning diversified yield.

Overall, a mixed strategy is often appropriate. Liquidity Mining incentives are used to bootstrap large amounts of transient TVL on top of POL positions, which provide a cheaper and consistent source of liquidity to desired pools that are shielded from market pressures.

Aera vaults have the unique ability to run both Liquidity Mining and POL strategies in a unified and seamless manner. Stay tuned in the coming days for a blog outlining how Aera can do this for your protocol.

Aera Team

Treasuries that deposit into an Aera vault have a unique opportunity to use Aera’s custom execution strategies onchain. A sophisticated Aera Guardian submits allocation solutions in line with the vault strategy and will always have specific role-based permissions built into any Aera vault.

How low liquidity-asset diversification works on Aera.

Step 1: Aera vault owner defines a goal. For example, a vault owner requests $10M of their native token to be diversified into stablecoins and ETH within a designated time period.

Step 2: The vault owner deploys the tokens to the vault.

Step 3: An Aera Guardian begins preparing recommended transaction sets that would diversify a treasury’s assets out of native tokens based on pre-defined slippage criteria.

Step 4: Once the treasury is successfully diversified, funds are ready for use in other Aera strategies or for other treasury needs.

Diversification strategy basics

Aera’s non-custodial and autonomous design allows a vault owner to efficiently swap out of native tokens and into stablecoins or higher-liquidity tokens to protect a treasury’s long-term value. The low-liquidity diversification strategy is comprised of three main pillars:

• Smaller order sizes: Large orders can be fractionalized into smaller ones to establish minimal price impact and slippage.

• Time-based execution: Orders can be executed over time to ensure native tokens retain their value as a treasury diversifies to ensure longevity and protect against market volatility.

• Flexibility: Updates to order sizes and execution timing of trades can be made continuously.

Why use Aera’s low-liquidity diversification strategy?

Minimized market impact: By breaking large orders into smaller components, the strategy reduces the impact of trades on market prices, resulting in more favorable execution prices over time.

Enhanced price discovery: Capturing the average market price of an asset over time fosters transparency and provides a risk-adjusted approach to trade execution. Aera’s diversification strategy efficiently manages large orders and mitigates risks associated with volatile markets.

Over the coming months, we will outline various other Aera strategies, including levered ETH staking, volatility targeting, and protocol-owned liquidity (POL). Each of these strategies can be combined or layered, offering vault owners a high degree of flexibility in their approach to treasury management.

If you want to learn more about how Aera can support your treasury management goals, we invite you to DM us on X.

The Status Quo

The current approach taken by most DAOs when financing grant programs is to directly use their native token (for example, ARB) as a form of payment. Since many DAOs hold a large share of their treasury in native tokens, this is usually the simplest and most convenient option for the DAO. However, grant recipients typically have costs that are not denominated or paid in tokens, such as payrolls, infrastructure, and software costs. This means that recipients eventually need to swap their tokens for a more widely accepted form of payment, and are incentivized to do so quickly due to the risk of unfavorable price movements that could jeopardize their operations. This status quo can lead to a significant price impact on the native token as recipients are unlikely to achieve optimal execution in their token sales. As shown by the chart below, execution quality varies greatly in observed trades, and grant recipients are rarely specialists in trading (they are not expected to be).

Poor execution reduces the overall efficiency of the grants program by requiring larger distributions to make the grants viable at a less favorable price. This means that the DAO will end up spending tokens at an inherently lower ROI than if the execution were ideal. While DAOs can try to provide guidance on how to reduce price impact, it is important to acknowledge that recipients have their own constraints and objectives and are under no obligation to follow such advice. We propose a different approach to grant funding that could help address some of these inefficiencies.

Protocol-Owned Execution

A more favorable scenario might be if the DAO could finance its grants with other tokens, such as stablecoins, that are less volatile and more widely accepted as a means of payment. To obtain the tokens for grant funding, the DAO can swap its native token using a more optimized execution strategy, a concept we call Protocol-Owned Execution (POE). This approach does not materially change the final token ownership structure, as the DAO is still distributing the native token to the community. However, by doing this through optimized execution, the DAO is able to better manage the price impact and realize more value from its treasury. In other words, by distributing the native token to users who are buying voluntarily in the open market, the DAO can secure a more efficient price than by distributing it via recipients who are often forced sellers due to their operational needs.

To highlight the impact of POE, we can consider some illustrative edge cases. For example, the DAO could theoretically swap the entire native token budget to stablecoins immediately, mimicking the action of forced selling by grant recipients. This would be the least useful type of POE, as it does nothing to improve execution. On the other hand, if the DAO strategically limited its sales to times when liquidity and volume conditions were favorable, it could markedly enhance the quality of execution. The assets obtained from these sales could then be allocated to generate yield, or otherwise optimized to the DAOs risk tolerance and payment needs. This strategic approach could lead to more stable market conditions and potentially better financial outcomes for all parties involved.

Aera for Protocol-Owned Execution

Strategies like POE are a perfect use case for Aera’s onchain treasury management vaults. To fund a grants program, DAOs could simply deposit their planned budget in an Aera vault that has been set up to swap the native token into a specified mix of assets. Once the execution is complete, the DAO could then distribute grants directly to recipients from the self-custodial vault. Recently, Aera demonstrated this capability through a pilot vault with Threshold, which successfully swapped $270K of Threshold’s native token into a yield-generating mix of ETH and stablecoin assets. Though the vault was fairly large relative to the typical onchain liquidity available in the native token, the execution was completed over roughly 6 weeks with minimal price impact. For grant programs, this type of Aera vault could enable significant improvements in efficiency and help mitigate excess price impact during grant distributions.

Aera is specifically built to enable DAOs to autonomously manage their treasuries by selecting long-term strategy targets and then simplifying the strategy’s routine maintenance tasks, such as portfolio rebalancing. By minimizing routine maintenance tasks, the need for ongoing DAO treasury governance is also minimized, empowering forward-thinking DAOs to adopt responsive, effective, and sophisticated treasury management practices. With Aera, DAOs can set and monitor long-term financial objectives that respond quickly to changes in market conditions, mitigate custody risks with transparent and noncustodial onchain operation, and minimize dangers associated with misaligned incentives — all without the burden of frequent governance votes. You can read our full press release on Aera’s progress and token sale here.

Aera now enables DAOs to:

• Select from various strategic targets for their treasury, including risk management via volatility targeting, deepening liquidity, generating yield on idle holdings, and diversifying treasury assets

• Benefit from continuous, autonomous rebalancing of vault assets to track targets, all without the need for routine, burdensome governance votes

• Specify allow-listing of assets and protocols via Aera’s audited smart contract, ensuring treasury assets are exposed only to pre-approved forms of risk

• See reporting dashboards showing data from the fully onchain protocol, ensuring transparent, real-time information on investment performance

• Use Aera’s no-lockup, noncustodial design, ensuring they remain in full control of their assets and can withdraw at any time without penalty

Reach out to Gauntlet, the team that built Aera, to learn more about leveling up DAO treasury management by contacting aera@gauntlet.xyz.

Though protocols can reduce losses with active risk management, there is always some risk that markets move too abruptly for loans to remain sufficiently collateralized. In these scenarios, protocols rely on their treasury to provide an additional backstop. To achieve this objective, treasury managers want to select an appropriate portfolio of assets to provide reliable coverage under any conditions.

** Diversification vs Hedging**

In the search for a reliable treasury strategy, the concept of diversification is often referenced. While diversification can provide some benefits, the more accurate way to represent the objective of a lending protocol treasury is liability hedging. The level of losses the treasury may have to cover is highly uncertain, and so is the market value of treasury assets at any given time. In a liability hedging framework, the role of treasury management is to align these two uncertain quantities such that the assets always exceed the liabilities.

In this sense, the protocol’s goal can be expressed with a single key metric: the expected solvency buffer under stressed market scenarios. Liability hedging may overlap with the idea of diversification, but the optimized portfolios are generally materially different. While there are many ways to achieve fixed diversification, the more nuanced problem of liability hedging is perfectly suited for Aera.

Aera Solution

The goal of Aera is to help protocols solve this hedging problem with automated rebalancing vaults that target customizable objectives. Since an Aera vault can be set up to optimize almost any quantifiable metric, treasury management with Aera can efficiently adapt to changing market conditions and user needs. Beyond simply diversifying, third-party Guardians within Aera can use live data and analytics to inform real-time rebalancing decisions.

With this more flexible approach, a protocol’s allocation across assets can be tailored to match its specific risk profile. Since this hedge more closely matches the liabilities, it does not have to be as large as a reserve fund allocating to less well-matched assets. As an alternative to fixed or ad hoc treasury allocation, a customized and data-driven Aera vault can provide valuable benefits to protocol safety and efficiency.

How do you choose the instruments that are traded within Aera? 

Tarun: The objective function, the thing that is used to grade the submitters and the universe of assets are chosen by the DAO when they vote to deposit assets into an Aera vault.

Right now at least, the universe of assets is fixed at the initial genesis of the vault. I think long term we've definitely thought about how to add and remove assets, but starting with a pure constant function market maker portfolio means you sort of can't do that. Like it effectively becomes kind of mathematically a lot harder to deal with.

But, you know, In the long run, we're definitely committed to trying to find ways to add and remove assets and especially as there are more derivatives in the protocol, so options, futures, et cetera having some kind of ephemeral assets will be pretty important. 

How do you prevent collusion between vault guardians and arbitrageurs? 

Tarun: This is the skin-in-the-game aspect of having the vault guardian stake some amount proportional to what they're managing.

In the paper, I think we give some sufficient conditions in the appendix, but there's actually a follow on paper that proves some sort of game theoretic properties of what happens between the two of them. But roughly speaking, you could basically think of it as profit beyond some sort of target threshold.

And the target threshold is like, how much is the DAO willing to pay in transaction costs? Because obviously there's no such thing as free rebalancing. So for every arbitrage, for every amount of arbitrage profit that's outside of that threshold, that gets passed on to the vault guardians via getting slashed.

And provided that the assets that are used to stake, can basically be slashed and that value is correlated to the value of the arbitrage profit, you effectively ensure, even if they're colluding, it's a negative. It's a non-positive sum game between the two of them.

And so that's sort of the long-term idea. Obviously, this relies on getting the amount of collateral that's placed to be correct. So you could think of this as sort of effectively choosing a collateral factor or LTV, like in the lending protocol, for the individual submitters. And if you look in the appendix it gives some of the sufficient conditions for that. 

But yeah, we definitely spend a lot of time on how to try to minimize collusion. Another reason for using Shapley values is that they have this really nice property that it's actually very hard to collude as a cartel to manipulate them. They're very expensive to compute, but they have really good manipulability properties. And so that's, that's sort of another thing that's quite important.

How do you choose an objective function or what is an objective function, in this system? 

Peteris: Yeah, I'll just add another point to the previous answer. In the spirit of over-determining security, we also have some smart contract protections, as well. So we definitely considered scenarios. If there's a single guardian and they're also an arbitrageur, how much damage they could do, and just making sure that their power is as limited as possible.

Now, in terms of the objective function, I think this is a question that is kind of really at the core of the value proposition. The way we think about it, the objective function is a combination of returns and risks. So each treasury has a specific objective. In terms of lending protocols, the objective ultimately exists to cover potential shortfalls. And so that drives kinda the risk component. Not to dive into too much detail, but what we're trying to do is driving the objective function to what shortfall could happen, as a result of the specific loan book positions that exist in a given lending protocol. We have methods of trying to effectively evaluate those positions and convert them into liabilities. And then we look at how those liabilities are distributed across tokens.

So not only do we expect these objective functions to be different per lending protocol. But also they very naturally, I think as one can realize, generalize to potentially other related problems as well.

What tools will you use to hedge risks, options or perps or something else? And will you only be using mainnet or do you plan to cover other domains?

Tarun: So the initial vault, which is live on Polygon, has only two assets right now, which are ETH and USDC. And the next thing that we're working on support for options.

And I think the idea is to help on-chain options protocols that don't have a lot of organic long term demand. Options are the easiest thing, at least for lending protocols, to write their exposure as I think perps are nice, but I think the funding rate volatility makes it a lot harder for a more passive vault to actually handle it versus an option, which is actually a really nice concrete way of doing it. And you asked about mainnet. I think our goal is any EVM chain, so we're definitely not locked to mainnet.

What is the minimum that a guardian needs to stake and for what time? 

Tarun: So, there are epochs. You have to stake for a particular number of epochs and you could think of it as, the DAO trades into that portfolio and then holds that portfolio over the epoch. And at the end of the epoch, you're graded based on its performance relative to your benchmark. And your benchmark, again, might be how well the portfolio covered the loan book, how diversified the portfolio was, or maybe it was absolute return. It could be any sort of thing. 

We've defined it in a way so that you have this optimization problem you're solving as opposed to a single concrete thing. So the precise amount of stake in dollar or ETH terms will depend on conditions at the time.

And again, if you go to the white paper, Page 68 to 69 covers how we're measuring the amount of collateral that is needed from the guardians to guarantee a certain amount of manipulation resistance. So there's sort of just a natural trade-off between how much capital is staked and how much assets can be managed.

I think another important thing to mention is there'll be a delegation system, so DAOs can delegate stake to members of their communities who are active and want to help. So I think hopefully that should ameliorate some of the staking cold start problems.

What is the minimum number of guardians?

Tarun: So yeah, there's sort of a trade-off. If you have a really large number of guardians per vault, you actually have this problem where the grading, the Shapley Values, actually get way harder to compute and your approximation of them can get very erroneous and potentially manipulable. So I think the target number is probably in the realm of like 10 to 15. Because that’s where you can actually correctly compute all of the attribution mechanisms and then correctly compute the attribution, like how much each person's portfolio contributed to the final output.

But another way of thinking about it is that a DAO could have many objective functions. One might be, to cover the loan book. One might be runway over this amount of time. And you can have many vaults with different objective functions and 10 to 15 guardians for each of them. And I think that's sort of it's the right amount of people where there's enough specialization for that particular objective, but also enough that it's actually quite hard to collude.

What would be the best way to diversify through Aera? Is it to specifically target diversification? Or is there some other type of mechanism?

Tarun: Aera is designed around the idea that portfolio management is an optimization problem, and it's an optimization problem that may not have a fixed goal. If it was a fixed diversification you could just basically put it in a fixed Balancer pool or something like that, and then, you'll eat the arb loss, but you'll keep yourself at the target forever.

But I think the idea is that people have objectives that are more easily specified by an objective function for a KPI of the DAO. So in the lending protocol, the simplest KPI is assets minus liabilities, and that is the objective function that you're measuring.

There may be certain times when you actually need to hold a bunch of options because the market's extremely volatile and you know it's better to do some volatility harvesting. There are times when the market is super mean reverting. You may just wanna hold spot assets. 

So it's not about a fixed static diversification as much as it's a fixed KPI. And so the reason we started with lending protocols is that lending protocols have this very, very concrete goal, which is that their insurance fund needs to ensure the solvency requirement. 

Peteris: And we're continuing to discover more ways of thinking about objective functions and incorporating things. And I think one of the tradeoffs in terms of coming up with a good objective function, is also that you have to consider the cost of retrieving that information, which is very real for vault guardians. They have to build ETL pipelines that can ingest and estimate those objective functions, so it's also a nuance. We're trying to strike a fine line.

Why Aera?

Over the last few years, decentralized solutions have emerged for many common user transactions, such as lending, trading, and liquidity provision. While current mechanics work well for spot transactions, managing future needs and hedging risk is challenging. Further progress of on-chain applications would benefit from the ability to optimize through time and uncertainty.

To illustrate, consider the example of a user with 1M USDC and needs 100 ETH. As a spot transaction, this is simple using existing solutions. Decentralized exchanges allow quick and efficient swaps, or a lending protocol could lend ETH on a collateralized basis. A trickier question is what to do about needs that are not immediate. If the user needs 100 ETH a month from now, they have three main options:

Option #1: Buy ETH now and hold. This option is low risk but relatively inefficient, as the total amount is funded upfront and held idle for a month.

Option #2: Do nothing now and buy ETH later. This option is more capital-efficient but introduces risk since the price could move unfavorably. 

Option #3: Buy a more capital-efficient derivative of ETH. This option could be good if it balances risk and capital efficiency, but a suitable derivative product is not always available.

To extend this further, consider a case with uncertainty and a time lag. For example, if the user needs 100 or 120 ETH at some time, 4 to 6 weeks from now, depending on market variables. This is a very tough problem with no widely applicable solution currently - Aera intends to provide one in the longer term.

Objective Functions

The insight of Aera is to approach these problems with a framework of numerical optimization. First, this involves defining an objective function to score how decisions work toward the eventual goal. The role of the objective function is to reduce the set of complex trade-offs to find the maximum score out of possible options.

For example, a protocol managing an insolvency fund might choose an objective function dependent on the value at risk of their loan book and current fund holdings. Since the key goal would be to maintain a safety buffer during market crashes, a simple version may be based on the correlation between asset values and the market risk level. After deciding on an objective function, finding the optimal course of action becomes a more workable problem to solve numerically.

Optimizing with Aera

As the first protocol designed specifically for this type of optimization, Aera seeks to address the most immediate use cases before expanding to more prospective applications. Tasks like runway and incentive management, where many DAOs have already encountered difficulties planning for the future, are two of the most immediate applications. In the initial version of the protocol, Aera will incentivize parameter submitters to optimize assets to a user-selected objective function. By harnessing the off-chain intelligence of experienced risk analysts, DAOs can improve their holdings' efficiency inside transparent and self-custodial vaults. Looking forward, Aera aims to build a flexible platform for users to manage any needs to their desired balance of risk and efficiency trade-offs. 

To learn more visit aera.finance

While the problem of planning for future expenses is present in both traditional and DeFi markets, it is difficult for DAOs to manage treasury funds efficiently with current mechanisms. Traditional institutions can allocate funds to more nimble managers who make day-to-day decisions or use structured products or derivatives for hedging, but DAOs do not have suitable analogues. External managers require strong incentive alignment, which is hard to achieve with the current DeFi infrastructure. While some DeFi derivatives and hedging products do exist, there is no one-stop solution for DAO treasury needs. Finally, DAOs managing their treasury through internal governance is also problematic because it requires a lot of active decision-making.

Today we are happy to introduce Aera, the world’s first autonomous, data-driven treasury management protocol. Our name is derived from various Latin words for public finance, public treasury, and coinage. We believe the solution is fitting of the name’s ancient origin.

Individual Vaults. DAOs access a unique, customized, self-custodial Aera vault where they can deposit token reserves.

Independent Rebalancing. Third-party Guardians can suggest adjustments to the composition of an Aera vault across a set of approved assets to optimize DAO treasury funds based on market conditions.

Access. Withdraw funds on-chain using our dashboard or by writing an event-based script that triggers withdrawal. Our dashboard stats show the composition of the vault, giving DAOs uninterrupted visibility and access to their assets.

How it Works

To align treasury management incentives in a decentralized way, we need to reward profitable decisions and penalize decision-making that results in losses. Aera achieves this by having decision-makers put their money on the line and grading them on how well they achieve protocol objectives. Every rebalancing proposal in Aera requires funds at stake, and the results create a public track record for participants.

Stakeholders

Vault Guardian: A guardian is a party that submits parameters (weights of assets) to an Aera vault to define the allocation of assets in the vault. To participate, a guardian must stake assets and risk a loss if their parameter choices underperform.

Client Protocol: A client protocol is any DAO that deposits a portion of their treasury into an Aera vault to plan for future expenses or commitments.

Arbitrageurs: An arbitrageur is any party that executes the rebalancing by trading assets with the vault. Arbitrageurs are incentivized to continuously rebalance the vault to its target allocation as determined by the vault’s guardians.

Benefits

Increase Capital Efficiency: With increased confidence, the treasury can cover spending needs, protocols may lower fees and extend more loans.

Save on Operating Costs: Aera can help DAOs meet liquidity needs in the most adverse of times without costly overhead.

Minimize governance: By using Aera, DAOs will outsource treasury management to a decentralized network of participants who are incentivized to maximize DAO goals while minimizing governance intervention.

Future

Today, Aera is in alpha, with one test vault funded and operated by Gauntlet. In Q1 2023, there will be opportunities for beta customers and guardians to join. In the longer term, we see Aera as a robust optimization platform for all sorts of applications. We believe protocols will be able to outsource almost any complex optimization problem to a specialized Aera vault. By helping automate these tasks, we hope to promote efficient and transparent decision-making to drive sustainable protocol growth.

Where to learn more

On October 19, 2022, at 11 AM EST, the Aera team will host an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Twitter Spaces. Questions about the whitepaper, launch, specifications, and other related topics will be answered as best as possible. Submit your questions here.

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