Audits
The Aera V3 protocol contracts powering Gauntlet vaults have been reviewed by multiple independent firms:Audit reports are published by the Aera protocol team. For the latest reports, see the Aera security documentation.
Gauntlet Risk Management
Aera is built and operated by Gauntlet, which has managed risk across 100+ DeFi protocols covering $48B+ in digital assets. Gauntlet operates as the guardian for Aera vaults, bringing institutional-grade risk infrastructure to vault operations:- Real-time monitoring — Gauntlet’s risk systems continuously evaluate market conditions, protocol health, and portfolio exposures to inform guardian operations.
- On-chain enforcement — Risk constraints are enforced at the protocol level via the guardian model and hooks. Constraint violations revert within the same transaction — there is no delay between detection and enforcement.
- Curation methodology — Markets and protocols are evaluated against smart contract risk, liquidity risk, oracle risk, and counterparty risk before inclusion in any vault’s allocation set. See Curation.
Trust Assumptions
What is not trustless: Strategy quality depends on Gauntlet’s off-chain risk analysis. Guardian liveness is required for active management (depositors can still withdraw if a guardian goes offline). Merkle tree updates are a governance action, not automated.
Circuit Breakers
- Pause — Vault owner or any guardian can halt all guardian operations within a single block, while preserving depositor withdrawals. No governance vote or timelock required.
- Hook-level guards — Individual hooks can reject operations when prices or exposures deviate beyond thresholds. Enforcement is synchronous — violations revert the transaction before any state change.
- Multi-guardian isolation — Vaults support multiple guardians with independent permission sets. Compromising one guardian does not grant access to another’s operations.