While much of the industry’s attention over the past year has been on stablecoins, tokenized treasuries and institutional developments, the team behind Velodrome and Aerodrome say the real power struggle in crypto is happening elsewhere: in decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Alex Cutler, the CEO of Dromos Labs, the main developer company behind Aerodrome and Velodrome, described the exchange layer as “the second most important layer” for the onchain economy in an interview with CoinDesk.
That vision is now shaping the company’s most aggressive move yet. Dromos Labs is preparing to unveil Aero, a unified DEX that will unify the existing Aerodrome and Velodrome protocols under one operating system and directly target incumbents like Uniswap and Curve.
The rollout, scheduled for the second quarter of 2026, will also mark Dromos Labs’ expansion into the Ethereum mainnet, putting the company in competition with the largest and most entrenched DEXs on the market.
Aerodrome currently accounts for a significant portion of trading activity on Coinbase’s Base network, while Velodrome plays a similar role in Optimism’s Superchain. Aerodrome currently has nearly $500 million in total value attached (TVL) and surpassed $1 billion in December 2025, when it accounted for approximately a quarter of Base’s total TVL, a level of dominance that Dromos Labs believes is repeatable on the mainnet.
While decentralized finance may no longer dominate daily crypto headlines, Cutler argues that it reflects consolidation, not stagnation. According to him, almost every story driving cryptocurrency adoption, from institutional currencies to memecoins, still relies on the same fundamental infrastructure.
“You can’t have a global FX onchain without deep liquidity and the ability to exchange it freely, across the entire network, 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 fulcrum of value as more assets move up the chain. This statement forms the basis for both Aero’s design and the company’s increasingly explicit positioning against Uniswap, the largest established player in the sector.
“One of the biggest stories next year will be: who owns the exchange layer?” Cutler said.
The competitive contrast became even sharper earlier this year when Uniswap’s board put forward a “UNIfication proposal” aimed at allowing protocol revenues to flow to the other countries. $UNI token holders. Cutler publicly criticized this move, arguing that it weakens Uniswap’s relationship with liquidity providers, the core engine of any DEX.
“They take from liquidity providers to give to 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 the operation of the protocol and share trading costs 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 been largely limited to layer 2 networks. Aero’s Ethereum mainnet launch aims to change that dynamic and test whether the model can scale against Uniswap and Curve in their home market.
While Aero is designed to serve retail users looking for liquidity across networks, Dromos Labs is also building with institutional adoption in mind.
“Institutions will use DeFi rails, but those rails have to be institutional quality, that’s non-negotiable,” Cutler said. “There should be no layers of human dependency. Everything should be verifiable.”
That includes onchain automation, reduced operational risk, and compliance tools embedded directly at the protocol level. According to Cutler, these features are essential as capital markets increasingly move on-chain.
Read more: Leading Base DEX Aerodrome merges with Aero in major overhaul