While much of the industry’s focus over the past year has been on stablecoins, tokenized treasuries, and institutional on-ramps, the team behind Velodrome and Aerodrome says the real power struggle in crypto is happening elsewhere: in decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the main development company behind Aerodrome and Velodrome, described the exchange layer as “the second most important layer” of the on-chain economy in an interview with CoinDesk.
This view now shapes the most aggressive decision the company has ever made. Dromos Labs is preparing to unveil Aero, a unified DEX that will merge its existing Aerodrome and Velodrome protocols under a single operating system and take direct aim at incumbents like Uniswap and Curve.
The deployment, planned for Q2 2026, will also mark Dromos Labs’ expansion onto the Ethereum mainnet, placing the company in direct competition with the largest and most entrenched DEXs on the market.
Aerodrome currently captures a significant portion of trading activity on Coinbase’s core network, while Velodrome plays a similar role in Optimism’s Superchain. Airfield currently has a total value locked (TVL) of nearly $500 million and surpassed $1 billion in December 2025, when it accounted for about a quarter of Base’s total TVL, a level of dominance that Dromos Labs says is repeatable on mainnet.
While decentralized finance may no longer dominate daily crypto headlines, Cutler says it reflects consolidation, not stagnation. Almost every narrative that drives crypto adoption, from institutional currencies to memecoins, still relies on the same fundamental infrastructure, he says.
“You can’t have global on-chain currencies without significant liquidity and the ability to trade them freely, across networks, at fast speeds and low costs,” he said. “The two essential pillars of the blockchain economy are the chain layer and the exchange layer – and every trend benefits these two.”
Dromos Labs’ strategy is based on the belief that exchanges, rather than blockchains, will become the primary fulcrum of value as more assets move on-chain. This thesis illuminates both Aero’s design and the company’s increasingly explicit positioning in relation to Uniswap, the largest incumbent in the sector.
“One of the most important questions next year will be: Who owns the exchange layer? » Cutler said.
The competitive contrast sharpened earlier this year when Uniswap governance put forward a “unification proposal” aimed at allowing the protocol’s revenue to flow to UNI token holders. Cutler publicly criticized the move, arguing that it weakens Uniswap’s relationships with liquidity providers, the main engine of any DEX.
“They’re taking liquidity providers and giving it to token holders – and that means paying less for DeFi’s most essential service,” he said.
(The UNification proposal is Uniswap’s plan to simplify how the protocol works and begin sharing trading fees with UNI token holders, a move that would change who would be paid within the exchange.)
Uniswap did not return a request for comment in time for publication.
Until now, Dromos Labs’ competitiveness has largely been limited to layer 2 networks. The launch of Aero’s Ethereum mainnet aims to change this dynamic and test whether its model can scale against Uniswap and Curve on their home turf.
While Aero is designed to serve retail users looking for liquidity on networks, Dromos Labs is also being built with institutional adoption in mind.
“Institutions will use DeFi rails, but those rails have to be institutional grade, that’s non-negotiable,” Cutler said. “There can’t be levels of human dependence. Everything has to be verifiable.”
This includes on-chain automation, operational risk reduction, and compliance tools built right into the protocol level, features that Cutler says are essential as capital markets move more and more on-chain.
Read more: Main Base DEX Airfield merges with Aero in major overhaul
