Aerodrome

• Name: Aerodrome
• URL: https://aerodrome.finance/
• Category: Base AMM / vote-escrow emissions market / gauge marketplace / managed-veNFT governance wrapper
• Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
• Summary: Aerodrome is Base’s main emissions market, not just its best-known DEX. The AMM matters, but the durable control surface is weekly veAERO voting over liquidity incentives, fee-and-bribe income to voters, managed relays that warehouse voting power, and the later Aero Fed monetary-policy layer.
• What it does:
  • Runs Base liquidity pools and distributes weekly AERO emissions to staked liquidity according to veAERO voting outcomes
  • Lets AERO holders lock into veAERO NFTs that vote on pool emissions and earn trading fees, bribes, and rebases
  • Supports Auto-Max Lock and permanently managed relay strategies that aggregate deposited veNFT voting power under strategy managers
  • Uses a Voter/Gauge architecture plus weekly epochs to coordinate emissions, rewards, and pool competition
  • Inherits Velodrome V2 contract architecture while adapting it to Base as a liquidity hub and adding Base-native governance, foundations, and public-goods allocations
  • Transitions long-run emissions governance toward an epoch-based monetary-policy process through Aero Fed once weekly emissions fall below a threshold
• Key claims:
  • The official intro page frames Aerodrome as a next-generation AMM designed to serve as Base’s central liquidity hub and says it inherits the latest features from Velodrome V2
  • The docs say LPs receive AERO emissions according to votes, while veAERO voters receive 100% of protocol trading fees from the previous epoch plus any voter incentives tied to the pools they support
  • The tokenomics docs describe Aerodrome as a “zero-leak economy” in which value is routed to LPs and veAERO operators rather than siphoned to a separate fee-taker layer
  • Those same docs say locks can be placed into Auto-Max Lock so voting power no longer decays, which is analytically important because it turns expiring vote-escrow into an optional permanent-governance posture
  • The emissions docs say weekly emissions begin at 10M AERO, rise 3% weekly during a 14-week take-off phase, then decay 1% per epoch until Aero Fed lets voters choose to increase, decrease, or maintain emissions as a percentage of total supply
  • The raw contract specification says Aerodrome is a rewrite and redesign of the Solidly architecture, supports stable and volatile pools, and allows voting power to aggregate through managed NFTs that remain permanently locked by default
  • The Relay docs show Aerodrome has first-party and partner-managed strategies that automate voting and claiming while concentrating deposited veNFT power inside manager-controlled (m)veNFT structures
  • The security docs show an Emergency Council can kill or revive gauges and activate or deactivate managed veNFTs, meaning governance markets still sit inside explicit emergency-control rails rather than purely permissionless competition
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Aerodrome whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official docs and public contract specifications; see ../whitepapers/aerodrome-primary-sources-2026-05-07.md.
• Sources:
  • https://aerodrome.finance/
  • https://aerodrome.finance/docs
  • https://github.com/aerodrome-finance/docs
  • https://github.com/aerodrome-finance/contracts
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aerodrome-finance/contracts/main/SPECIFICATION.md

Internal linkages

• Keep this note on the strongest comparisons only: velodrome, curve, and hidden-hand.

Comparable to / differs from

• Comparable to: Velodrome first and Curve second.
• Differs from: Hidden Hand, which monetizes routed vote power instead of originating emissions.

Governance / control risk

• Practical authority sits in gauge listing and kills, Emergency Council powers, managed veNFT activation, relay-manager defaults, and whichever venue becomes the default parking lot for veAERO.
• Call it a DEX if you want; the real fight is over who steers emissions.

Rent / leverage sink

• The rent is the right to steer Base liquidity incentives, collect side payments for votes, and intermediate governance through managed locks.

• Value can accumulate above the pools in the meta-layer where protocols compete to rent influence over which pools get subsidized next.

• Last reviewed: 2026-05-30 UTC