Aerodrome and Velodrome merge into Aero across seven chains

Dromos Labs has merged Aerodrome, the leading DEX on Base, with Velodrome, the leading DEX on OP Mainnet, into a single platform called Aero, deploying across seven networks. The combination follows a late-2025 announcement that initially targeted a Q2 2026 window, per The Block and The Defiant.

What shipped

Aero launches on Ethereum mainnet, Base, Robinhood Chain, Ink, OP Mainnet, Arc, and Arbitrum. The Block confirms all seven; previous Dromos Labs communications had emphasized Ethereum mainnet and Circle's Arc as the headline additions beyond the two original L2 homes, per earlier coverage from Crypto Briefing.

The merger is governed by Dromos Labs with Alex Cutler as founder and CEO. Base remains the primary liquidity hub.

Token mechanics

The migration unifies two previously separate token economies, per The Block:

• AERO + VELO → AERO. Existing AERO and VELO holdings migrate to a single new AERO token.
• veAERO + veVELO → sAERO. Vote-escrowed positions on both chains convert to sAERO, Aero's unified staked governance asset.
• Dromos Labs' earlier announcement, as summarized by Crypto Briefing, preserved the pre-merger revenue split: 94.5% to AERO holders, 5.5% to VELO holders.

The engine behind it

Aero runs on METADEX03, Dromos Labs' trading stack. Three features drive the pitch:

1. Embedded MEV auctions. Order-flow value captured at the pool level rather than extracted by third-party searchers.
2. A dual engine billed as improving capital efficiency over the previous ve(3,3) design.
3. MetaSwaps, a cross-chain swap primitive meant to make Aero behave as one liquidity surface across the seven networks rather than seven isolated venues.

Dromos has not published independent benchmarks for the capital-efficiency claim. The Block and The Defiant both describe the launch without TVL figures for the combined platform at ship time.

What to watch

1. Which pools migrate first. AERO/USDC on Base and VELO/USDC on OP Mainnet are the two dominant pairs under the ve(3,3) model; whether liquidity consolidates onto a single Aero-chain pair or stays split by network will be visible on-chain within days.
2. Robinhood Chain and Arc. These are the two newer permissioned-ish destinations in the list; neither has public TVL figures comparable to Base or OP Mainnet. Early depth there is a stronger signal than the Ethereum-mainnet deployment, which Aerodrome never previously had.
3. ve-token conversion rates. The on-chain conversion from veAERO and veVELO to sAERO is the mechanism most likely to produce disputes if the rate shifts voting weight unexpectedly. The sAERO contract address and governor configuration should land on Aero's docs ahead of the first proposal.

Context

The Aerodrome–Velodrome merge is the latest in a run of consolidations among ve(3,3) forks that split off from Andre Cronje's original Solidly design in 2022. The pattern — a single team behind the two most liquid forks reunifying them before incumbents on Ethereum mainnet catch up — mirrors Uniswap's own moves. Uniswap's "UNIfication" plan proposed to activate protocol fees and burn 100M UNI from the treasury; both signal that DEX teams are moving from growth-at-all-costs to tokenholder-value structuring at roughly the same moment.

What the Aero launch does not yet answer: whether the seven-chain spread meaningfully fragments liquidity, or whether MetaSwaps' cross-chain routing collapses the fragmentation back into a single order book.