Aerodrome Finance

Aerodrome is an automated market maker: traders swap tokens against pools of paired assets that users deposit, and the price comes from the ratio of assets in each pool rather than an order book. It launched on the Base network on 28 August 2023, without venture funding or a token sale, according to its docs. It runs two pool designs: a constant-product AMM and a concentrated-liquidity AMM called Slipstream.

The legal body is the Aerodrome Foundation, a Cayman Islands exempted limited guarantee foundation company registered on 18 August 2023. That comes from the EU crypto-asset white paper Aerodrome filed under MiCA, which names directors Glenn Kennedy and Sean Inggs and a registered office at a Cayman corporate-services firm. The same Foundation is the counterparty in the aero.xyz website terms, where it is called the Aero Foundation. The white paper was notified in June 2025 and, as it states itself, has not been approved by any EU authority; a notification is not a licence.

The software is written by Dromos Labs, which calls itself the core contributing development company behind Aero and also built Velodrome on OP Mainnet. Its site names Alexander Cutler as chief executive and Stas Sușcov as chief technology officer, and says the firm took no VC money and sold no tokens. Neither Dromos nor the Foundation publishes accounts or headcount.

Aerodrome pays liquidity providers mainly in newly minted AERO rather than in trading fees, and lets token holders decide where those rewards go. The cycle runs in seven-day epochs starting every Thursday at 00:00 UTC:

• AERO holders lock tokens to get veAERO, an NFT that carries voting power. The docs say about 51% of the 1.88 billion supply was locked as of April 2026, with an average lock of about 3.7 years.
• veAERO holders vote each week on which pools receive AERO emissions. In return they collect that pool's exchange revenue: all swap fees from staked liquidity plus any incentives (bribes) projects deposit to attract votes.
• LPs who stake their position earn AERO; LPs who leave it unstaked earn the swap fees directly. A position cannot earn both. In emissions-eligible Slipstream pools the protocol takes 10% of unstaked LPs' fees by default.
• Emissions were held at about 10.9% a year heading into the merger, and veAERO holders got a weekly rebase to offset dilution.

Aerodrome's docs say this model has carried over $185 billion in volume, $270 million in swap fees and more than $450 million paid to voters as of April 2026. Those are the company's own figures. For how Aerodrome compares with other decentralized exchanges, see our ratings.

On 21 October 2026 at 8:00 PM EDT, Aerodrome and Velodrome were combined into Aero, a single exchange with one token running on Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Arbitrum, Ink, Arc and Robinhood Chain. Dromos Labs first announced the plan in New York on 12 November 2025. At launch, Aerodrome and Velodrome emissions stopped, all their gauges were switched off, and new AERO rewards began on Aero.

The upgrade terms published on the Aero hub are:

• 1 AERO becomes 1 new AERO, and 1 VELO becomes 0.044 new AERO. Velodrome holders get 5.5% of the new supply and Aerodrome holders 94.5%, matching each exchange's share of combined revenue in the year before the announcement.
• veAERO and veVELO become sAERO (staked AERO), which keeps the remaining lock time rounded up to a full week.
• Total new supply is capped at about 2.127 billion AERO. Aero expects realized inflation of about 12% a year, with a 20% ceiling.
• Nothing converts automatically. The upgrade is done in the portal on aerodrome.finance, it cannot be reversed, and it needs a little ETH on Base for gas.
• There is no deadline, but the hub warns that the old front ends may be shut down later.

Aero keeps the vote-directed model under a new name, Predictive Allocation. sAERO holders point rewards at pools on any Aero chain, with a 47-hour cooldown between changes at launch, and receive 100% of pool exchange revenue. Rewards are now set in dollar terms and can be capped per pool. Holders on exchanges should follow their exchange: according to Crypto Briefing, Coinbase will convert customers' AERO and VELO between 2 and 4 November 2026 and pause deposits and withdrawals of the old tokens during that window.

Traders pay a swap fee set per pool and shown in the app before each trade; the docs do not publish one fee schedule for all pools. Who receives the fee depends on the LP's choice, as the table shows. Gas on Base is paid separately to the network.

On Aero, Slipstream V3 pools add dynamic fees that rise when markets move fast and, on supported layer 2s, recapture some MEV. Aero says it will add programmable fee rebates for desks and aggregators.

The contracts are permissionless and need only a self-custodial wallet; there is no account or KYC. The website terms, however, say users must not reside in a long list of countries that includes Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela, and must not evade geofencing. Tokenized stocks appear on the exchange, and the terms bar US persons from unregistered securities. Issuers can also restrict their own tokens by region.

Aerodrome's docs describe its contracts as immutable and audited by Spearbit and ChainSecurity, and its security page says they inherit the Velodrome V2 architecture and its bug bounty. The Pool Launcher was audited by MixBytes between 12 September and 3 October 2025. Aero's contracts were audited by Sherlock and ChainSecurity in five engagements, followed by a three-week public Sherlock contest, and a Sherlock bug bounty opened at launch. An audit lowers risk but does not rule out bugs.

Immutable does not mean no one has powers. An Emergency Council, made up of Aerodrome team members and figures from the Optimism and Base communities, can kill or revive gauges, rename pools, activate or deactivate veNFTs and appoint a new council. Separate multisigs control the Foundation, incentives and Public Goods Fund allocations. Their addresses are on the security page.

The record of trouble is at the website layer. On 29 November 2023 and again on 22 November 2025, attackers took over the aerodrome.finance and velodrome.finance domains and served look-alike sites that drained wallets of anyone who signed. The Block put early losses in 2023 at over $40,000; in 2025 Bitcoin.com cited on-chain estimates above $1 million. No completed compensation was found. The contracts were not touched either time. Before signing, check the address and what the wallet is asking to approve; our token approvals explainer covers why this matters.

Other risks are the usual ones for this design: LPs carry price risk on their deposits, AERO rewards lose value if the token falls, and voting rewards depend on which pools other holders favour.

LPs can withdraw from pools at any time; there is no lock on liquidity itself. veAERO locks run until their expiry, but the Aero upgrade converts them to sAERO with the same time left rather than releasing them. The upgrade flow moves LP positions where a matching Aero pool exists; positions with no direct match need a manual withdrawal.

Support runs through support.aero.xyz, and the Aerodrome security page directs vulnerability reports to Discord or the contacts on GitHub. Contract addresses are published in the Dromos Labs GitHub repositories and the docs; the Aerodrome site also lists official mirror sites for use when the main domain is unsafe.

Aerodrome launched on Base on 28 August 2023 with 500 million AERO, most of it issued as locked veAERO, including 200 million to Velodrome lockers. Its front end was hijacked in November 2023 and again in November 2025. In June 2025 the Foundation notified a MiCA white paper for AERO. Dromos Labs announced the Aero merger on 12 November 2025, an Aero Lite deployment went live on Arc in September 2026, and Aero launched on 21 October 2026.