The Vault Model
The single most important design decision in AERA
Before explaining how the agent thinks or trades, it's worth explaining something more basic: where does your money actually go, and who can touch it?
AERA never takes custody of your funds. This is worth dwelling on, because it's the foundation everything else is built on top of.
What "custody" means, and why it matters
"Custody" is just a word for "who actually holds and controls the asset." When you put money in a traditional brokerage account, the brokerage has custody — your account shows a balance, but the actual assets are held and controlled by the company. If that company mismanages funds, goes bankrupt, or acts in bad faith, you're exposed to that risk, because you never actually held the asset yourself.
AERA is built the opposite way. When you deposit funds to use AERA, they go into a vault — a smart contract, which is really just a small program living on the blockchain, whose rules are fixed and visible to anyone. This vault is created for you, and functionally, it's yours: you can see everything in it, you can withdraw from it, and no one — including AERA the company — can move funds out of it except in the specific ways the contract allows.
What the agent is actually allowed to do
AERA's AI agent is given something called a manager role on your vault. This sounds like a big grant of power, but it's actually very narrow by design. The manager role allows the agent to call exactly one function: a rebalance function. It cannot withdraw your funds to some other address. It cannot send your money anywhere except into the specific, pre-approved trades that function allows — and even those trades are boxed in by rules described in detail on the Constraints & the Trust Model page (hard limits on trade size, which assets are allowed, and more).
A useful way to think about it: imagine giving someone a key that only opens one specific cabinet in your house, and that cabinet only lets them swap one approved item for another approved item, in limited quantities, on a limited schedule. That's closer to what the manager role actually is than "AERA controls your money."
What you can always do — no exceptions
- Deposit and withdraw your funds, at any time, without asking anyone's permission.
- See everything. Since the vault lives on a public blockchain, your holdings and full transaction history are visible and verifiable by you directly — not just something AERA tells you about.
- Change your own rules — for example, tightening your risk limits or changing which sectors you're comfortable holding.
- Revoke the agent's access completely. One action turns your vault back into a plain holding that nothing but you can touch — instantly, without a waiting period or an approval process.
Why we built it this way instead of the easier way
It would genuinely be easier, from an engineering standpoint, to build AERA as a normal company that takes your deposit and manages it internally, the way a traditional fund does. We didn't do that, on purpose. The tradeoff of the vault model is that it's more complex to build — but the benefit is that your worst-case exposure is fundamentally limited. If AERA the company ceased to exist tomorrow, your funds would still be sitting in a vault only you can withdraw from. That's not true of most financial products, and we think it should be true of this one.