Aero Launches Today: Get on Board
Aero launches today across seven networks, built to win onchain flow by raising the market rate for liquidity and directing 100% of revenue to an open network of participants.
The onchain era is here. Aero is built to power it.
Tokenization and the wider adoption of onchain technology is accelerating. More and more, existing markets are coming onchain, and new markets continue to form and innovate.
Soon, the world will not distinguish between the “onchain economy” and the broader economy. It will simply be the economy, onchain.
Today, Aero launches as the unified liquidity layer built to power trading and value exchange in this new era, coordinating onchain markets in a single system and behind one token: AERO.
This new platform forms part of the next-generation infrastructure that will bring the world onchain.
The unification of Aerodrome and Velodrome—two of the most successful exchanges on Ethereum L2s—Aero will continue to function as participant-owned market infrastructure, designed to raise the compensation rate for liquidity providers while directing 100% of exchange revenue from pools to sAERO holders who direct the flow of AERO rewards.
The new Aero launches without venture backing or a token sale: the entire supply of new AERO goes to existing AERO and VELO holders, with no dilution to team or VCs.
Why Aero exists
Every economy is built in layers. At the foundation are the frameworks and rules that govern activity. Directly atop that foundation sits the liquidity layer—the infrastructure that makes it possible for economic participants to easily exchange value. Onchain, this second layer is as essential as the blockchains themselves, because liquidity and value exchange is required for other economic activities to occur. It’s also a big business. Onchain spot exchanges generated $3.1 billion in fees over the last 12 months, second only to stablecoins and more than derivatives, lending, or the chains themselves.
Aero is designed to own that opportunity and distribute that value, expanding participation and rewarding each participant in proportion to their contribution. It is built on the belief that propelled Aerodrome and Velodrome to win in their respective ecosystems: in an onchain, increasingly agentic era, the only durable moat is maximum value distribution to users.
The model: pay liquidity providers more
Every exchange is a three-sided economy, balancing the interests of three groups: traders, liquidity providers, and token holders.
Aero is designed to align the incentives of all three and serve each of them fully, and it starts by paying LPs more. This is because for an exchange to function at all, it needs liquidity. And for an exchange to win, it needs deep liquidity that increases efficiency and opens the door to new value and revenue streams over time.
Inspired by this, Aero is designed to sustainably compensate liquidity providers more than the competition, and its model rests on a premise that runs against intuitions forged by the business design of legacy exchanges:
The value of liquidity should not just be measured by the trades it enables in this block, or the next, but also by its contribution to the long-term earning power of the network it helps make possible.
Block by block trading fees is one expression of that value. It is not the only one. Take one other example:
At launch, Aero earns revenue from liquidity and launch payments, just as Aerodrome and Velodrome have for years. Issuers, protocols, and ecosystems can make these payments to encourage token operators to direct liquidity rewards toward markets they want to support for any reason. Maybe an issuer needs a functioning market before trading activity generates fees, or an ecosystem can want an asset to remain accessible across all conditions. No matter the motivation, these participants have a reason to pay for liquidity beyond the fees generated by the trades currently using it, and liquidity payments make that demand visible as revenue.
As an exchange grows, the same liquidity network can support additional products, execution services and revenue streams. And liquidity itself is a critical input into that growing network business. By understanding this, and building an economic system around it, Aero can effectively raise the market rate for liquidity by compensating LPs for the full value they enable over time.
To accomplish this, Aero needs a way for target LP compensation rates to break the “point-in-time fees” limit that most exchanges are structurally bound to.
The solution: rewarding LPs with a token that is itself a proportional claim on the future revenue growth of the whole network.
AERO, when staked as sAERO, is that claim. Now and in the future, 100% of exchange revenue accrues to the token or its holders. Every revenue stream at launch streams directly to sAERO holders in real time.
When an LP chooses to receive AERO rewards, the trading fees from that position become exchange revenue, which is distributed to the sAERO holders who allocate the system’s liquidity rewards to that market.
Participation on both sides is open: anyone can deposit liquidity to earn by facilitating exchange activity. Anyone can stake AERO and allocate rewards to earn exchange revenue. sAERO holders looking for a hands-off approach can configure management of their position through Autopilot, which automates the allocation process and can compound or convert earned exchange revenue at a regular cadence.
Paying LPs for the true value they provide sets off a flywheel:
- Better LP compensation attracts deeper liquidity.
- Deeper liquidity attracts more flow.
- More flow generates more revenue for the token operators coordinating liquidity.
- Token operators direct more rewards to the LPs who earn them.
A model that already won
Aerodrome and Velodrome launched without the two things the industry says you need to win: venture backing and a first-mover advantage. What they had was a model that worked better for participants.
Together they have won the majority of volumes on Base and OP Mainnet combined, and distributed more than $580 million to the people who stake their tokens. That is more revenue distributed to holders than any DEX, on any chain, ever. And they did it operating on networks that represent a mere ~17% of EVM spot trading volume.
The model is also built to win new high-value asset classes as they come onchain. Aerodrome, even on the previous version of the MetaDEX, has already proven this power across three of the largest markets:
- FX - Currencies are the most traded market in the world, at about $9.6 trillion a day. In the first half of 2026, Aerodrome did more onchain FX trading than every other DEX combined.
- Bitcoin - Bitcoin is the largest crypto asset. In the third quarter of 2026, Aerodrome handled more bitcoin-dollar trading than any other DEX.
- Tokenized stocks - Listed stocks worldwide are worth about $150 trillion, and only about $3 billion has been tokenized so far. On Ethereum and its layer-2 networks, Aerodrome’s share of tokenized-stock DEX trading went from single digits in August to more than half on October 10.
That is what the model did on Base and OP Mainnet. Aero now brings it to seven networks as one exchange, including Ethereum Mainnet, Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain, Ink, and Arc.
What’s new on Aero
Aero keeps what helped its predecessors win, and rebuilds the rest. Older ve(3,3) exchanges were built for a simpler market: backward-looking, periodic and static.
Aero is optimized for the new era: predictive, continuous and intelligent. The result is the familiar flywheel rebuilt to spin faster and more efficiently.
Better LP compensation
Paying LPs competitively is a question of when as well as how much. When volatility rises and prices dislocate, the risk of providing liquidity grows precisely when demand for it is greatest. Aero is built to pay more in those moments.
AERO rewards are now calculated in dollars, not tokens, and each pool’s rewards rates can be capped to track a multiplier of projected revenue, recalibrated frequently instead of once a week.
Critically: as a pool’s activity rises, so can a cap, meaning its max rewards rate can rise with it. This market-responsive mechanism may allow AERO-earning LPs to earn more when it matters most.
To maintain a sustainable token economy, AERO rewards held back by a cap are never minted at all.
For LPs who choose to earn fees instead, Slipstream V3, Aero’s latest concentrated-liquidity AMM, includes upgraded dynamic fees that rise when markets move fast, and on supported layer-2 networks it can recapture MEV that would otherwise leak.
Deeper liquidity
Aerodrome and Velodrome will be one exchange, with one token and liquidity network that spans seven chains. A pool on one chain can fill orders from traders from across the network. This means liquidity can stay deep and capital-efficient in fewer pools instead of being fragmented across chains.
More flow
Onchain flow is no longer a synonym for retail trading. It includes institutional settlement, professional arbitrage, agentic trades, liquidations and more, and Aero is built for all of it.
Metaswaps let traders bridge, route and swap in a single transaction, filled by Aero’s own onchain liquidity rather than off-chain counterparties.
Aero’s native onchain data contracts let AI agents, aggregators and wallets integrate and execute directly, without the need for expensive custom development.
Programmable fee rebates will let desks, aggregators and routers earn discounts on public, auditable terms, helping Aero win more of the flow that moves through them.
Revenue for token operators
Distributing value is half the job. The other half is capturing it. Aero pairs the people who bear market risk, LPs, with the people who want exposure to it: token operators, who earn more when markets move. When an LP takes AERO rewards, the dynamic fees and MEV capture on that position become exchange revenue, so the upgrades that pay fee-taking LPs more can also earn more for sAERO holders.
Over time, Aero can also add new revenue streams, and every one will accrue value to the token or its holders.
Beyond exchange revenue, the Momentum Fund, an Aero Foundation program, has a mandate to strengthen and stabilize the AERO token economy through contributor grants, strategic allocation to new markets and market-aware token buybacks and burns.
Rewarding proof of foresight with Predictive Allocation
Most DEXs leave liquidity to organize itself. Aerodrome and Velodrome gave that job to an open network of token operators. Aero keeps the network but makes allocation continuous and pays operators for getting it right.
AMMs answered what the price of an asset should be. With Predictive Allocation, Aero can help answer where capital needs to go. Token operators choose which markets the exchange should support with AERO rewards, LPs follow, and in return the operators earn a proportional share of the revenue those markets produce while their allocation is live. Because this process is continuous and real-time, operators who back a market early, correctly believing it will be productive, can earn the largest share of revenue when it accrues. The system doesn’t simply reward participation. It rewards being right. And because the prediction isn’t just a bet, but an allocation, it can be the very thing that makes the desired outcome more likely, even moving liquidity ahead of demand.
Get on board
Aero launches (October 22, 00:00 UTC). AERO and VELO upgrade to the new AERO, and veAERO and veVELO positions upgrade to sAERO.
The entire upgraded supply goes to existing AERO, veAERO, VELO and veVELO holders, split 94.5% to the Aerodrome community and 5.5% to the Velodrome community, matching each protocol’s share of combined revenue in the 52 weeks before Aero was announced.
- Upgrade tokens and migrate liquidity at aerodrome.finance and velodrome.finance.
- Stake, allocate and find new pools at app.aero.xyz.
- Full instructions are in the Aero Upgrade Hub at aero.xyz/aero-upgrade.
Aero’s contracts have been audited by Sherlock and ChainSecurity across five separate engagements, followed by a three-week public audit contest on Sherlock. A Sherlock bug bounty goes live on launch day.
