If you wanted to trade Bitcoin on a decentralized exchange a couple of years ago, your options were limited and the experience was, charitably, rough. Now Aerodrome Finance has quietly turned Coinbase’s Base network into the preferred venue for onchain Bitcoin spot trading, commanding somewhere between 50% and 65% of Base’s entire DEX market share.
That’s not a typo. A single protocol is handling more than half of all decentralized trading volume on one of the fastest-growing Layer 2 networks in crypto. And its grip has been tightening since January.
How Aerodrome cornered the Bitcoin DEX market
The story starts with cbBTC, Coinbase’s wrapped version of Bitcoin on Base. When cbBTC launched, Aerodrome captured 78% of its initial trading volume.
That early dominance wasn’t an accident. Aerodrome launched on August 28, 2023, as a fork of Velodrome, the leading DEX on Optimism. But rather than simply copy-pasting the code and calling it a day, the team behind the protocol, Dromos Labs, built what they call a “MetaDEX” model. Here’s the thing: the model channels trading fees and protocol incentives directly to users through a vote-escrowed governance mechanism called veAERO.
