Aerodrome Finance

AERO is the governance token of Aerodrome, a decentralised exchange on Base, used to vote on rewards and earn trading fees.

Aerodrome Finance is a decentralised exchange (DEX) on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network incubated by Coinbase. People swap tokens against pools of liquidity supplied by other users, and pay a small fee on each trade. The AERO token was created on 28 August 2023. Aerodrome was built by Dromos Labs, the team behind Velodrome on Optimism, and reuses Velodrome's design.

AERO has no fixed supply cap. It started with 500 million tokens, 90% of them locked from day one, and new AERO is issued every week to liquidity providers. Total supply was about 1.99 billion AERO on 27 September 2026. Holders can lock AERO for up to four years to get veAERO, which gives voting power. Each week veAERO holders vote on which pools receive the new AERO. In return they receive the trading fees of the pools they vote for and 'incentives' (often called bribes) that other projects pay to attract votes, plus a rebase of new AERO that offsets dilution.

Aerodrome is one of the main trading venues on Base. It hosts pools for stablecoins, major tokens, newly launched tokens and, since August 2026, Coinbase's tokenised US stocks for users outside the US and a few other countries. AERO itself trades on large exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance and Kraken.

Dromos Labs plans to merge Aerodrome and Velodrome into a single cross-chain exchange called Aero, launching on 21 October 2026 on seven networks. VELO will be folded into AERO (94.5% of the combined distribution to AERO holders, 5.5% to VELO holders), veAERO will become 'staked AERO' (sAERO), and new rules will tie token rewards to each pool's revenue, with a global cap expected to hold inflation under 20% a year.