No.129
Aerodrome Finance AERO
The liquidity pilot who gathers votes and steers the fee-wind toward the busiest pools
๐ญ The control-tower flying boat of the Base runway, built in the same hangar as Velodrome
๐ฌ โTower, this is Aero. Which pool is busiest today? Wherever your votes pile up, that's where I send the fee-wind. Cleared for takeoff!โ
- A decentralized exchange (DEX) running on 'Base', Coinbase's Ethereum L2.
- Lock your AERO and you get votes plus 100% of the trading fees. That setup is called ve(3,3).
- The same team built Velodrome on Optimism first; Aerodrome is its Base counterpart. There's no supply cap.
๐ The Story
Meet Aero, a little flying boat with a yellow control-tower hat and a radar dish spinning on its back. Its job is simple to describe: it sits over 'Base', the Ethereum L2 that Coinbase built, and points traders toward the pools where the action is. When you lock your AERO, you hand Aero your votes, and Aero steers a stream of trading fees toward whichever pool the votes favor.
The team behind Aero didn't start here. They first built Velodrome over on Optimism, got the design working, then brought the same idea to Base. So Aero is less a brand-new invention and more a sibling craft from the same hangar, tuned for a new runway.
That tuning paid off fast. Aerodrome opened on Base on August 28, 2023, and roughly $2 billion in liquidity flooded in within the first day. It settled into place as the largest DEX on Base, which is more or less where it has stayed.
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
Aero doesn't have a blockchain of its own. It's a smart contract (a program) that rides on top of Base, the Ethereum L2 built by Coinbase. The heart of it is ve(3,3). โ Lock AERO for up to four years and you receive veAERO, which becomes your votes. โก Each week you vote on โwhich pool should get more rewards?โ โข You receive 100% of the trading fees from the pool you voted for, split in proportion to your votes. That's the flywheel (the whirlwind): trades โ rewards โ vote again, round and round.
๐ Light & Shadow
- It anchors the whole Base ecosystem as its main exchange (roughly $2B in liquidity arrived on launch day)
- The reward is easy to follow: vote for a pool, collect 100% of that pool's trading fees
- The design wasn't invented from scratch. It had already been running on Optimism as Velodrome first
- There's no supply cap. Fresh AERO is minted every week, so the supply keeps growing and holdings can get diluted (the opposite of Bitcoin's fixed 21 million)
- The price swings hard, like most DeFi tokens. If Base itself goes quiet, Aero feels it too
- Its website front-end was once hijacked through DNS, in the same incident that hit Velodrome (the contracts held; the trap was the page people typed into)
๐งฌ Evolution Lineage
Aero is a descendant of the ve(3,3) design that started with Andre Cronje's Solidly (2022). It's a sibling of Optimism's Velodrome, built by the same team, Velodrome for Optimism, Aerodrome for Base.
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What is Aerodrome Finance?
- It's a decentralized exchange (DEX) running on 'Base', the Ethereum L2 built by Coinbase. It's both a trading venue and the 'liquidity hub' of the Base ecosystem. It launched on August 28, 2023, and quickly grew into the largest DEX on Base.
- What is ve(3,3)?
- When you lock AERO for up to four years, you receive veAERO, your votes. Each week you vote on โwhich pool should get more rewards,โ and you receive 100% of that pool's trading fees, split in proportion to your votes.
- Is there a supply cap?
- No. Unlike Bitcoin (fixed at 21 million), AERO is inflationary, new tokens are emitted every week, so the total supply keeps growing. Of the initial supply of 500 million, 450 million (90%) was locked as veAERO.
- How is it related to Velodrome?
- They're sibling projects built by the same team. Velodrome runs on Optimism, and Aerodrome runs on Base. Both inherit the ve(3,3) design that started with Andre Cronje's Solidly.
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK ยท 2026-06-04).