# Guardians and Strategies ### Who are vault guardians Each vault has a set of one or more designated guardians elected by the vault owner to implement a specific strategy. Each guardian can submit operations and pause the vault (in the event of a security emergency). Guardians are sophisticated actors who specialize in using off chain intelligence to achieve onchain objectives. They develop proprietary technology that allows them to effectively implement a wide variety of strategies. Each vault owner can pick the set of vault guardians that are best suited to achieve their objectives or even elect a vault guardians from within their own team. A guardian **cannot** (among other things): * Deposit or withdraw any funds/liquidity * Change what actions they are able to perform by adding/removing oracles or whitelisting hooks * Elect other guardians ### Why they matter Guardians implement strategies and help customers get value from Aera vaults. A strategy aligns expectations between customers and guardians, allowing guardians to achieve customer objectives while operating in a predictable way. Strategies may: * Have diverse sets of objectives dependent on the goals of depositors * Interact with different sets of external protocols onchain See our use cases for examples of strategies. ### How to become a guardian/develop strategies To become a guardian, please contact our team (contact us). Strategies are typically developed by professional risk managers and their development is beyond the scope of this document. For the technical requirements of developing a working strategy, see the “For Guardians” section. ### Caveats While guardians, their addresses and hooks are maintained onchain for each vault, strategies do not have any onchain representation or enforcement other than how individual guardian actions are constrained by the relevant hooks. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.aera.finance/guardians-and-strategies.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.