dex

The rollout of Aero, targeted for the second quarter of 2026, will take direct aim at incumbents like Uniswap and Curve, the team told CoinDesk.
That view is now shaping the company’s most aggressive move yet. 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 rollout, targeted for the second quarter of 2026, will also mark Dromos Labs’ expansion to Ethereum mainnet, putting the firm into head-to-head competition with the largest and most entrenched in the market
Aerodrome currently captures 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 roughly a quarter of Base’s total TVL, a level of dominance Dromos Labs says is repeatable on mainnet.
While decentralized finance may no longer dominate crypto’s daily headlines, Cutler argues that it reflects consolidation, not stagnation. In his view, nearly every narrative driving crypto adoption, from institutional FX to memecoins, still depends on the same foundational infrastructure.
You can’t have global FX onchain without deep liquidity and the ability to exchange it freely, cross-network, at fast speeds and low cost,” he said. “The two essential pillars of the onchain economy are the chain layer and the exchange layer — and every trend benefits those two.”
Dromos Labs’ strategy is rooted in the belief that exchanges, rather than blockchains, will become the primary footholds for value as more assets move onchain. That thesis informs both Aero’s design and the company’s increasingly explicit positioning against Uniswap, the sector’s largest incumbent.
One of the most important stories next year is going to be: who owns the exchange layer?” Cutler said.
The competitive contrast sharpened earlier this year when Uniswap governance advanced a “UNIfication proposal” aimed at allowing protocol revenue to flow to UNI token holders. Cutler publicly criticized the move, arguing it weakens Uniswap’s relationship with liquidity providers, the core engine of any.
They’re taking 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 approved plan to simplify how the protocol works and begin redirecting some of its trading fees from liquidity providers to the protocol.)
Uniswap did not return a request for comment in time for publication
Until now, Dromos Labs’ competitiveness has largely been confined to layer-2 networks. Aero’s Ethereum mainnet launch is intended to change that 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.
Institutions will use DeFi rails, but those rails have to be institutional-grade, that’s non-negotiable,” Cutler said. “There can’t be human dependency layers. Everything has to be verifiable.”
That includes onchain automation, reduced operational risk and compliance tooling embedded directly at the protocol level, features Cutler says are essential as capital markets increasingly move onchain.
#DEX
#CpIWatch
#Uniswap
#Goion
#UFO

In 2022, I deposited $ETH into a decentralized exchange called FolkDelta, one of the earliest Ethereum-based DEXs.
Everything looked normal — except for one mistake.
I set the gas fee too low.
The result?
The transaction stayed pending for years.
During that long pending period, FolkDelta shut down completely.
To most people, this is where the story ends.
"The exchange is gone.Funds are gone.”
But DeFi doesn’t work like that.
A Year Later, Curiosity Kicked In
After a year, curiosity made me check the transaction again.
This time, instead of panic, I did on-chain analysis.
What I discovered surprised me:
✅ The transaction was now successful

✅ The ETH had left my wallet

✅ The funds were sitting inside the EtherDelta 2 smart contract
The website was gone.

The UI was gone.

But the smart contract was still alive.
What Most People Get Wrong About DeFi
Many people believe:
“If an exchange shuts down, the funds are gone.”
That’s not always true in DeFi.
Websites can die,
Companies can disappear,
Frontends can shut down,
But smart contracts live on-chain — permanently.

Serious Question
Where does your ETH go when a DEX shuts down?
It doesn’t vanish.
It stays inside the smart contract, waiting for the same wallet that sent it to retrieve it.
If you still control your private key, your funds may still be recoverable — even years later.
The blockchain doesn’t care about time.
It only cares about keys.

How the Recovery Was Possible
The ETH was locked inside the EtherDelta 2 smart contract.
To recover it, I used a wallet that supports private key imports and manual contract interaction — MyEtherWallet (MEW).
Steps in simple terms:
Imported the original wallet using the private keyManually interacted with the EtherDelta smart contractCalled the withdraw functionThe smart contract sent the ETH back to the same wallet that originally deposited it
✅ Recovery successful.
No customer support.
No admin approval.
Just math and code.

Final Thoughts
Early DeFi was the Wild West.
Many people didn’t lose funds to hacks —
They lost them to lack of knowledge.

If this story helps even one person understand:
how DeFi really workswhy private keys matterand why “dead” doesn’t always mean “lost”
Then it’s worth sharing.👍🏽

Not your keys, not your coins — but also:
If you have your keys, time doesn’t matter.
$ETH
#DEX