Aerodrome and Velodrome merge into one token called Aero

Base and Optimism's two biggest decentralized exchanges stopped competing for the same liquidity and became one. The new token, Aero, now trades across seven chains. At 8 p.m. ET on October 21, Aerodrome Finance and Velodrome Finance shut down as separate exchanges and relaunched as a single protocol called Aero. Dromos Labs, the team behind both platforms, built the merger around a straightforward problem: Aerodrome dominated Base with roughly $480 million in total value locked and $180 million in fees over the past year, while Velodrome, running the same playbook on Optimism, had shrunk to about $56 million in TVL and $7 million in fees. Two near-identical vote-escrow exchanges were splitting the same style of liquidity across two chains instead of pooling it.