Aerodrome Finance launches $400K public audit contest with Sherlock ahead of major upgrade

Aerodrome Finance is putting $400,000 on the table for anyone who can find bugs in its upcoming Aero upgrade. The three-week public audit contest, run through Sherlock’s Audit Engine, kicks off August 31 and represents the last major security checkpoint before the protocol’s anticipated September mainnet launch.

What the contest actually involves

The audit contest is the first open-participant engagement using Sherlock’s Audit Engine, a platform that blends AI-assisted analysis with human security researchers. Sherlock introduced the Audit Engine on August 18, positioning it as a new model for coordinated security reviews. Aerodrome’s Aero upgrade gets the honor of being its inaugural public deployment.

The structure is straightforward: independent security researchers comb through the Aero codebase over three weeks, flagging vulnerabilities in exchange for a share of the $400K prize pool. The bigger the bug, the bigger the payout.

Prior to opening the contest to the public, the protocol ran multiple rounds of private audits through both ChainSecurity and Sherlock. Neither firm found critical or high-severity vulnerabilities during those reviews.

The Aero upgrade, explained

The upgrade being audited, known internally as MetaDEX03, introduces two key economic mechanisms: Predictive Allocation and the AER Engine. Both are designed to solve a persistent problem in decentralized exchanges, the misalignment between the rewards liquidity providers earn and the actual fee revenue their liquidity generates. Predictive Allocation attempts to route incentives toward pools that actually generate trading fees, while the AER Engine handles the mechanics of distributing those adjusted rewards.

The Aero upgrade is also a product of the Aerodrome-Velodrome merger, combining infrastructure from both protocols into a unified liquidity layer on Base. Aerodrome originally launched on Base in August 2023 as a vote-escrow automated market maker, using AERO token emissions and vote-lock mechanisms to incentivize liquidity provision.

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