Aera is the vault framework Gauntlet built to run onchain treasuries: a vault whose holdings a curator manages across lending markets and liquidity, priced by a calculator the curator marks and bounded by the guardrails written into the vault. On Base it holds Gauntlet's USD Alpha and the exaUSD vault, dollar strategies that take USDC and hand back units whose price only moves as the strategy earns.

Entry and exit run through the vault's provisioner rather than the vault itself. A deposit is a request: the provisioner holds the dollars in escrow and the vault's solver fills it at the calculator's price, usually within minutes, minting units to the depositor, or hands the dollars back once the request's deadline passes. A redemption is the same in reverse. The price is the curator's mark, refreshed as the vault's positions move, and the calculator refuses a price that has gone stale.

That design keeps the vault honest and it also keeps it slow to touch by hand. A request has to be sized against a price that moves, filled by someone else, and watched until it lands. The best moment to rotate into a curated dollar vault rarely coincides with the moment you remember to.

Every number an Aera vault publishes is a step in a plug: the price of a unit, what a deposit would buy and what a redemption would pay. A request goes in when a condition is met, floored at the price the vault quotes in that same transaction, and the next step can wait on the units arriving.

Idle dollars requested into the vault the block they land. A redemption requested the moment the unit price crosses the line you drew. A position valued at the curator's own mark without leaving the plug. Curated vaults reward the depositors who move on schedule, and a plug keeps the schedule.