The Aerodrome MetaDEX

Aerodrome is a MetaDEX, combining the best of Curve, Convex, and Uniswap into a single streamlined protocol uniquely designed to serve as the primary trading and liquidity hub of the Base ecosystem.

By bringing the most important primitives under one roof, Aerodrome offers protocols and users on Base a complete platform for liquidity attraction, yield farming, and low-slippage swaps:

• AMMs:
  UniV2 style vAMM, Curve Style sAMM, UniV3 Style clAMM

• Liquid Locks:
  veAERO is tradable, no derivative token needed

• Auto-Voting:
  Relay offers a Votium style auto-voter and compounder

• Rewards:
  veAERO voters earn 100% of staked platform rewards

As a MetaDEX, Aerodrome plays a critical role for the Base ecosystem. Over 13,700 veAERO lockers vote every week to direct AERO rewards to the most productive liquidity pools on the platform, injecting a powerful economic stimulus into the ecosystem, and allowing Aerodrome to onboard over 100 partner protocols to Base.

Thanks to its novel design, Aerodrome now supports over $650M in TVL, $25B in annualized volume, and nearly 180K monthly active accounts. Its TVL dominance now puts it over 2X the combined TVL of all other DEXes (including Uniswap and Sushiswap).

Deep Liquidity Powering Volume

Aerodrome will continue to evolve to support the next 1 billion onchain users. The release of Slipstream, a custom-built implementation to concentrated liquidity pools, demonstrates how Aerodrome can harness the power of its unmatched liquidity depth to enable the best onchain trading execution on Base.

Slipstream aims to support up to 10X the volume per TVL as clAMM pools and deliver proportionally higher rewards from trading fees to veAERO voters. With customizable tick spacing, optimized fees, and a custom fee algorithm, Slipstream is rapidly increasing its share of total Base volumes and vamping away activity from industry leader Uniswap.

As volumes continue to increase, veAERO voters will receive higher fee rewards and drive additional TVL to the pools, thus perpetuating the flywheel.

Aerodrome’s TVL is more than 2X the combined TVL of all other Base DEXs, and will become more efficient with automated liquidity management built by Mellow Protocol. Their solution, currently in audit, will provide very deep liquidity within and near the current price range, enabling very large trades with low slippage. This will also enable higher average rewards for LPs without having to rebalance positions.

Volumes through Aerodrome’s liquidity pools continue to rise thanks to integrations with major DEX aggregators, as well. Odos and KyberSwap have added routing through Aerodrome pools, and other major aggregators like 0x and 1inch are finalizing their integrations.

Directing The Onchain Economy

Beyond growing the Base economy, Aerodrome’s incentives engine adds a layer of resiliency to the network by retaining liquidity during periods of lower activity and enhancing strategic initiatives for the health of the ecosystem, such as boosting adoption for native USDC, growing staking & restaking protocol presence Base, and rewarding builders with a long-term stake on the network.

Native USDC: Aerodrome recently partnered with Base to accelerate adoption of native USDC on the Base ecosystem. Through a joint program with Gauntlet and partner protocols, Aerodrome steered AERO rewards from USDbC, which previously dominated Base TVL, to USDC liquidity pools.

As a result, native USDC TVL on Aerodrome grew to $150M, an increase of over 1,760% in a span of five months.

Staking / Restaking: Aerodrome also supports the growth of strategic Liquid Staked Tokens such as cbETH, wstETH, ezETH, rETH and weETH, which have collectively surpassed $45M in TVL. The best swap execution for Coinbase’s cbETH is now on Aerodrome, surpassing even Ethereum mainnet.

Long-term builders: Aerodrome recognizes and rewards partners that take a long-term stake in the Base ecosystem. The Flight School program, for example, rewards AERO lockers, high volume tokens, and protocols incentivizing voters by airdropping veAERO NFTs to the protocol teams.

So far, a staggering 24,134,346 veAERO has been distributed, giving protocols a powerful tool to direct AERO emissions to their preferred liquidity pools, receive weekly voting rewards, and extend the sustainability of their liquidity programs. What’s more, the Flight School program consistently acquires AERO by compounding rewards from a veAERO NFT allocated for the program, further decentralizing veAERO distributing and adding a force of stability for the protocol.

Protocols that have accumulated veAERO can also leverage Relay, Aerodrome’s automated voting system, to compound voting rewards to grow their veAERO positions and increase rewards. Our 20 partner relays and Flight School now contain 73.2M veAERO, or 12.7% of the entire veAERO supply, which is being autocompounded each week. Relay creates structural support for the system by consistently capturing and locking AERO.

A Vision of the Future

Aerodrome is executing on a clear vision of becoming the top liquidity and volume hub on Base. Rewards generated for veAERO voters through voting incentives and swap fees have continued to increase. At the same time, AERO emissions decrease at 1% per epoch until the AERO FED kicks in at Epoch 67. Voters eventually will determine Aerodrome’s monetary policy to ensure a healthy epochal emission rate.

As part of the expanding Optimism Superchain, Base is destined to help scale Ethereum by reducing transaction costs and increasing throughput without sacrificing security. They have decided to incorporate ETH as the gas token, and OP will continue to operate as the governance layer of the Superchain. AERO is the de facto incentive token and has proven to be a boon for the growth of the Base ecosystem. Aerodrome swap fees and voting incentives have delivered increasing rewards to veAERO voters.

Base’s Onchain Summer II will bring more builders and users into the ecosystem. Our team will continue to do what’s made Base so successful by providing liquidity solutions for protocols. Aerodrome launched because we understood Base is a unique L2 ecosystem that will attract builders and users that closely integrate with Coinbase’s services. Coinbase One, Coinbase’s revolutionary Smart Wallet, and the Institutional offerings will all require a dedicated exchange on Base: Aerodrome.