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 automa...