Aerodrome: The DEX Built to Be Base’s Liquidity Hub
Base’s leading DEX, where locked AERO votes steer rewards
Aerodrome Finance is a decentralised exchange (DEX) that opened in August 2023 on Base, the Ethereum L2 built by Coinbase, and AERO is its reward and voting token. It was made by the team behind Velodrome, a similar exchange on OP Mainnet.
1. Who built it
Dromos Labs, the developer of Velodrome, launched Aerodrome in August 2023, just after Base’s mainnet opened to the public. It aimed from the start to be Base’s central liquidity hub, and the Base Ecosystem Fund received early voting power (veAERO). On a DEX, smart contracts swap tokens from pooled funds instead of a company holding customer money.
AERO is paid out weekly to liquidity providers and becomes voting power when locked, so AERO holders decide where the exchange’s fees and rewards flow. On the Crypto Nation map, AERO stands in Base City in the capital region, because it was first issued on Base.
2. The ve(3,3) design
Locking AERO for up to four years gives veAERO, an NFT carrying voting power that grows with lock length. Each week veAERO holders vote on which pools get the most new AERO, and they collect the trading fees from those pools plus incentives, often called bribes, that projects offer for votes.
Liquidity providers earn AERO instead of fees, while token projects post incentives to attract votes and keep their tokens liquid. Slipstream, concentrated-liquidity pools where providers pick a price range, arrived in 2024. The design, known as ve(3,3), combines Curve’s vote-locking with a game-theory idea of rewarding cooperation.
3. Uses and milestones
Many new tokens and stablecoins on Base open pools on Aerodrome, and trade-routing services route through its liquidity. As Base usage grew, Aerodrome became one of the most active exchanges on the network.
In November 2025 Dromos Labs announced plans to merge Aerodrome and Velodrome, which launched with the same design on OP Mainnet in 2022, into a single exchange called Aero. That same month the two sites’ web domains were hijacked; the team said the smart contracts were not affected and urged users to follow official guidance.
4. Things to know
AERO is issued every week, so supply keeps growing, and a key question is how well fees and incentives support that growth. Weekly emissions were designed to decline over time and later be tuned by holder votes. Large vote holders and projects that spend heavily on incentives can steer where rewards go.
Aerodrome depends heavily on Base, which uses a sequencer run by Coinbase to order transactions. Token conversion terms and timing under the merger plan should be checked in official announcements, and smart contract bugs and website attacks remain risks.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.