Aerodrome leads Base’s surge in total value locked to near $1 billion

Quick Take

  • Base saw a significant increase in total value locked (TVL), led by Aerodrome.
  • The TVL has doubled from the amount recorded at the beginning of March, which was $470 million.
  • Nearly half of Base’s TVL is attributed to Aerodrome, contributing $424 million.

Base, a Layer 2 Ethereum network incubated at Coinbase, saw its total value locked (or user deposits) surge to nearly $1 billion — doubling the network’s deposits since the start of March, which stood at $470 million. Decentralized exchange Aerodrome accounts for nearly half of Base’s TVL, contributing $424 million.

Aerodrome’s TVL surged from $125 million in early February to now over $420 million, following an uptick in user activity on the exchange and a major spike in the value of its native Aero token.

The development team at Velodrome Finance (a decentralized exchange on OP Mainnet) introduced Aerodrome on Base as a forked version in September 2023.

It has since facilitated a large portion of swaps on the Base network. This approach is similar to its strategy on OP Mainnet with Velodrome, which involves using a set of decentralized finance incentives and vote-escrowed governance.

The Base mainnet became publicly available in early August 2023 and has since risen to become the fourth most valuable Layer 2 blockchain in terms of TVL, trailing other networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Blast. The Layer 2 network recorded a sudden spike in daily users and transactions, reaching record highs shortly after the Dencun upgrade.

According to DeFiLlama, the network’s TVL stands at $970 million.


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About Author

Vishal Chawla is The Block’s Crypto Ecosystems Editor and has spent over seven years covering tech protocols, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Vishal can be reached on Twitter at @vishal4c and via email at [email protected]

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