Work on Aera and help shape the future of treasury management
Aera is the world’s first autonomous, data-driven treasury management protocol. It allows treasuries and crypto institutions to achieve highly personalized objectives using a trust-minimized execution mechanism that taps into the best onchain opportunities.
Auditless is a web3-native protocol studio focused on protocol strategy, design & development. We help crypto protocols improve their performance through strategic advisory and protocol development.
As we recently announced, Auditless has been tasked with supporting the Aera Foundation in developing future versions of the protocol.
✨ To than end, we are hiring several protocol engineers at different seniorities. If you're interested in the opportunity, please check out the Jobs page and apply.
If you're wondering if this is the right opportunity for the next stage in your career, allow me to share some context.
Aera is solving a real and unique problem
Existing protocol treasuries form a large and underserved market. Due to friction in governance processes, regulatory burdens and the communication challenges associated with decentralized organisations, the majority of capital in these treasuries is sitting idle.
As Matthew Liu articulated for Blockworks:
The evolving crypto landscape cannot survive without crypto-native firms taking a more proactive approach toward treasury management. By blending traditional financial wisdom with crypto’s unique dynamics, firms can build a solid treasury framework that will help them navigate uncertainty and capitalize on opportunities.
So if the market is substantial and the appetite to act is there, why haven't existing solutions worked?
For one, nobody has figured out how to do treasury management in a decentralized or trustless way while preserving the dynamics of what is needed to respond to a rapidly evolving crypto market.
Most existing treasury management solutions effectively fall into one of three buckets:
- One-time treasury diversification. These approaches are explicit about what yield farms they prefer and usually allocate capital into a set of vaults. This is your grandfather's retirement fund but applied to crypto treasuries. Principled but hopelessly static.
- Centralized treasury management. The DAO elects a treasury manager who is somewhat restricted by smart contracts and effectively has a very broad remit around asset class choices and investment strategies. Breaks a lot of the properties that DAOs seek to achieve like credible neutrality, limiting points of failure and others.
- Inaction by democracy. The DAO only makes large reallocation decisions based on voting. Usually these decisions are driven by point-in-time proposals from DAO service providers who have their own incentive sets and don't lead to comprehensive objective-driven strategies.
Note that these three pillars form a perceived treasury management trilemma between Decentralization, Principled allocation and Effective allocation.
Faced with three choices that are fundamentally unappealing DAOs choose to keep their capital largely unallocated.
Aera breaks the treasury management trilemma
Aera is a solution that achieves all three desirable properties: trustless, principled & responsive treasury management. Here's how that works:
- Aera achieves responsiveness and efficacy by using off-chain guardians. Guardians are able to build complicated data pipelines and strategies to ensure that treasuries are managed using best available market instruments, are risk-aware, liquidity-aware and otherwise responsive to market conditions.
- Aera achieves trustlessness by limiting what guardians can do at the protocol level. A comprehensive hooks contract is used in each vault that limits the types of actions that a guardian can take and how they can impact the vault, bounding possible loss. Every action a guardian takes happens with assets that are approved, with actions that are whitelisted and with consequences that are within the approved parameters of the treasury owner. Safety first. Trustlessness will further improve as the initial permissioned model will evolve to a permissionless implementation with progressive decentralization.
- Aera achieves principled strategies through the use of a custom objective function for each treasury. The stated objective function serves as a point of alignment between the DAOs objectives and the guardians' actions. Guardians are incentivized to act only in ways that improve the objective function of the vault and not limited to simple strategies like seeking yield without consideration of insolvency.
Aera is built on a modular and extensible stack
Treasury management is a highly complex and easily obfuscated problem domain.
The “obvious” solution to a problem is can easily be convoluted and led to an accumulation of custom features, points of centralization and other forms of tech debt.
The entire Aera team fought against complexity, carefully evaluating what should exist onchain vs. off-chain and how Aera could serve a very wide array of institutions while being easy to reason about from a security perspective.
The result was a simple and modular protocol:
➡️ For more detail on how that works, you can read the behind the scenes.
🖥️ If you are just curious about the codebase, here’s the GitHub of the first two versions including audits.
Aera has traction
Perhaps most importantly, a growing number of DAOs are already running parts of their treasuries on Aera, lending credibility to the overall value proposition and our ability to deliver on it with a protocol.
One of the contributing factors to this is that Aera has a non-parasitic nature. It's a protocol that can happily exist to operate a tactical subset of a larger treasury and is additive and collaborative to existing treasury management offerings in the market.
For parts of treasuries that need to be responsive, principled and trustless, Aera can be used, sized and tuned appropriately.
The friction of deploying an Aera vault is already smaller than most alternative treasury management approaches today.
The Aera documentation transparently explains what's involved in vault operations today.
What's next?
Aera's successful start begets the question of the future.
There are clear vectors along which Aera will expand both vertically and horizontally.
On the vertical front, Aera's whitepaper outlines the vision behind decentralized treasury management driven by off-chain intelligence. There are many exciting problems to solve and translate into elegant protocol solutions in what is a category-defining protocol.
On the horizontal front, the Aera protocol has the privilege of being able to experiment with and use some of the latest tools in DeFi. A treasury needs to generate yield, trade tokens, borrow, provide liquidity and do many other functions that necessarily interact with a large surface area of DeFi.
It's the responsibility of the Aera core team to continuously and safely incorporate newly emerging protocols and ERC standards on the market to keep improving vault performance for clients. We are early adopters of ERC4626 for instance and are looking at many other standards.
As a protocol engineer for Aera, you will think about and write code that solves problems which other teams haven't even attempted to solve. You will do so in a highly collaborative way, working closely with the Gauntlet team and our external partners.
You will also help evolve our systems around shipping secure smart contracts. We have explored and adopted many modern practices like executable specifications, invariant testing, internal security reviews, extensive inline protocol documentation, explicit trust models and will continue to add to this list.
Simply put — you won’t be building the 20th DEX or lending protocol with a slightly different trading or interest rate curve.
If you're excited by solving challenges in unknown territory, you should definitely consider applying.
The best way to start a conversation is via the Jobs page.
Why the future is exciting
Ultimately, progress at Aera means progress in treasury management across crypto.
Improving the reliability and speed at which treasuries can fund and achieve their objectives means more progress, more public goods and a more stable and competitive crypto industry.
It's a worthy mission that will benefit long-term crypto-aligned token holders and not just drum up the next wave of speculation.
