Mellow winds down Autopilot as Aerodrome prepares for Aero launch

Autopilot, the automated liquidity management service on Aerodrome powered by Mellow ALM, is shutting down its public operations. Liquidity providers who still have deposits in the tool are being told to pull them out.

The timing is deliberate. Aerodrome is heading toward Aero, a unified liquidity layer that folds Aerodrome and Velodrome together and ships with its own built-in automation suite. Third-party autopilots are becoming redundant.

What is changing and when

Autopilot will stop public operations after the March 25, 2026 epoch. From there, it moves into a private mode.

Users have until April 25, 2026 to withdraw their deposits through the Autopilot interface. That gives depositors roughly a month after the final public epoch to exit.

Positions remain non-custodial throughout. They are held through veNFTs, which means users keep control of their assets during the transition rather than handing them to an operator.

A quick translation for anyone outside the Aerodrome bubble. veAERO is locked AERO that carries voting power over where the exchange directs its rewards. Managing those locks well, voting each epoch, and collecting the resulting rewards is tedious. Autopilot automated that chore.

Autopilot by the numbers

For a tool now being retired, Autopilot carried real weight. It managed approximately 50 million veAERO per epoch and facilitated over $2.5 million in rewards distribution before the wind-down announcement.

Mellow ALM has powered Aerodrome’s liquidity management tools since at least 2024, including v2 upgrades aimed at dynamic strategies that rebalance positions as market conditions shift.

Why Aero makes Autopilot redundant

Aero is set to launch on October 21, 2026. It is designed to unify Aerodrome and Velodrome under a single AERO token as a cross-chain MetaDEX supporting seven EVM chains.

Aero plans to include a comprehensive Autopilot suite of its own, designed to handle automated LP strategies, voting mechanisms, and rewards systems natively.

The research frames the Autopilot wind-down as a strategic shift toward Aero’s integrated automation. Independent public tools are being phased out in favor of solutions baked directly into the protocol.

What this means for liquidity providers

The immediate action item is simple. Anyone with deposits in Autopilot should plan to withdraw before April 25, 2026.

The more interesting question is what happens in the gap. Public Autopilot operations end after the March 25, 2026 epoch, while Aero is not scheduled to launch until October 21, 2026. That leaves a stretch of months where users who relied on automation will need another plan.

The non-custodial design offers some reassurance through the transition. Because positions sit in veNFTs controlled by users, the wind-down is less a forced exit than a scheduled move. Users decide when to withdraw, as long as they do it before the April 25, 2026 deadline.