While much of the industry’s attention over the past year has turned to stablecoins, tokenized government bonds and institutional onramps, the team behind Velodrome and Aerodrome say the real power struggle in crypto is unfolding elsewhere: in decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the lead developer company behind Aerodrome and Velodrome, described the exchange layer as “the second most important layer” to the onchain economy in an interview with CoinDesk.
That point of view now characterizes the company’s most aggressive move to date. 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 such as Uniswap and Curve.
The rollout, targeted for the second quarter of 2026, will also mark Dromos Labs’ expansion to the Ethereum mainnet, putting the company in head-to-head competition with the largest and most entrenched DEXs on the market.
Aerodrome currently occupies a significant share of trading activity on Coinbase’s Base network, while Velodrome plays a similar role across Optimism’s Superchain. Aerodrome currently has nearly $500 million in total value locked (TVL) and surpassed $1 billion in December 2025 when it accounted for about a quarter of Base’s total TVL, a level of dominance Dromos Labs says can be replicated on the mainnet.
While decentralized finance may no longer dominate crypto’s daily headlines, Cutler argues that it reflects consolidation, not stagnation. In his view, almost every narrative driving crypto adoption, from institutional currency to memecoins, still depends on the same basic infrastructure.
“You cannot have global FX onchain without deep liquidity and the ability to exchange it freely, across networks, at high speeds and low costs,” he said. “The two essential pillars of the onchain economy are the chain layer and the exchange layer – and every trend benefits these two.”
Dromos Labs’ strategy is rooted in the belief that exchanges, rather than blockchains, will become the primary foothold of value as more assets move on-chain. This thesis informs both Aero’s design and the company’s increasingly explicit positioning vis-à-vis Uniswap, the sector’s largest established provider.
“One of the most important stories next year will be: who owns the exchange team?” Cutler said.
The competitive contrast was sharpened earlier this year when Uniswap management advanced a “UNIfication proposal” aimed at allowing protocol revenues to flow to UNI token holders. Cutler publicly criticized the move, arguing that it weakens Uniswap’s relationship with liquidity providers, the core engine of any DEX.
“They are taking from liquidity providers to provide token holders – and that means paying less for the most essential service in DeFi,” he said.
(The unification proposal is Uniswap’s plan to simplify how the protocol works and start sharing trading fees with UNI token holders, a move that would change who gets 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. Aero’s Ethereum mainnet launch is intended 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 chasing liquidity across networks, Dromos Labs is also building with institutional adoption in mind.
“The institutions will use DeFi rails, but those rails have to be institutional grade, that’s non-negotiable,” Cutler said. “There can be no human layers of dependencies. Everything must be verifiable.”
That includes onchain automation, reduced operational risk and compliance tools embedded directly at the protocol level, features that Cutler says are critical as capital markets increasingly move on-chain.
Read more: Leading Base DEX Aerodrome merges into Aero in major overhaul
