Aera Finance Raises $8 Million To Scale DAO Treasury Management
As the leading DeFi-native economic research firm, Gauntlet have pioneered ways off-chain intelligence can enhance onchain protocols through optimal control. To help DAOs make better capital allocation decisions in their treasuries, they set out to build a novel protocol and were looking for an R&D partner to help design and implement it.
🏦 Interested in using Aera for your treasury? Contact the team.
✨ Looking for help building your protocol? Just DM “Protocol” on Twitter.
Challenge
Protecting over $9 billion in client assets, Gauntlet is the leading DeFi-native economic research firm used by market leaders like Uniswap, AAVE, Maker, Compound and others. When they set out to improve treasury management, it became clear that a non-custodial onchain protocol would be the best vehicle to do so. Having already conducted foundational research on what a decentralized treasury management mechanism could look like (some of these ideas can be seen in the Whitepaper), they needed an R&D partner to develop these concepts into a category-shaping protocol.
Solution
Auditless worked closely with the Product, Engineering, Leadership and Business Development teams at Gauntlet as well as with our engineering partners Blockvis and security partners Spearbit to shape & develop a trust-minimized treasury management protocol which uses current DeFi instruments and off-chain guardians to satisfy a variety of custom treasury objectives.
The live Aera protocol is pioneering custom treasury objectives for each client, a frictionless deployment process and a path to decentralization through the use of a guardian role.
Results
The Aera Foundation has now raised $8M from Jump Crypto and Bain Capital Crypto to continue scaling the protocol while protocols and institutions already manage $4.3M of their treasuries using Aera.
+$4.3M since inception
Auditless helped develop two major versions of the Aera protocol (V1 and V2), which had led to several active treasury deployments. The flexibility of the underlying smart contracts allows Aera to address distinct needs with each deployment, varying from volatility targeting, deepening liquidity, generating yield on idle holdings and diversifying treasury assets.
Clients are drawn to the trust model that Aera provides, where guardian actions are highly limited and guarded by a variety of pre and post-execution hooks that include action whitelisting, allowance checks and limits on vault value changes — all enforced onchain.
On the flipside, Aera clients have full and immediate control over their funds and are free to utilize their Aera vault as a wallet.
+$8M raised for Aera
The ideas and traction behind the Aera treasury management solution have led to partnerships with world leading crypto investors (Source: PR Newswire):
“The Aera team has developed a much-needed solution perfect for crypto-native organizations looking to responsibly manage their treasuries,” said Stefan Cohen, partner at Bain Capital Crypto. “Aera is the first solution of its kind for DAO treasury management and was built by a team that’s amazingly well equipped to usher in a new era of responsible decentralized finance growth.”
📬 Want more research from Auditless? Subscribe to the Newsletter.
