On October 21 at 8 p.m. Eastern time, Aerodrome Finance and Velodrome will stop operating as two separate exchanges and become Aero, a single cross-chain liquidity layer for Ethereum. The change is structural rather than cosmetic. It folds the leading decentralized exchange on Coinbase’s Base network together with its Optimism counterpart into one token, one rewards system, and one set of upgrade portals, and it places the work of migration in the hands of the holders themselves.
The token conversion is fixed and manual. One AERO becomes one new AERO. One VELO becomes 0.044 AERO, a rate that follows directly from the ownership split: Aerodrome holders receive 94.5 percent of the new supply, while Velodrome holders receive 5.5 percent. Nothing converts on its own. Anyone holding AERO, VELO, or the locked veAERO and veVELO positions must move them through the upgrade portals at aerodrome.finance and velodrome.finance after launch, and the upgrade is irreversible.
The split reads more clearly through the supply numbers. Aerodrome accounts for roughly 2.01 billion AERO at launch, and Velodrome about 2.66 billion VELO. Velodrome’s 5.5 percent share works out to about 117 million of the new token; dividing that across the 2.66 billion VELO supply produces the 0.044 rate. The merged supply is capped near 2.13 billion AERO, and any token that is never upgraded simply never reaches circulation.
The migration carries its own timetable. Liquid tokens and any veNFT that did not vote in the final epoch can upgrade the moment the portals open; veNFTs that did vote wait one more hour. Locked positions carry over, with remaining lock time rounded up to the next full week and permanent locks converted to maximum-duration stakes. Because there is no forced deadline, the sensible order is to claim unclaimed rewards, clear active votes, and check the new contract address against official Aero channels before approving any transaction.
The more consequential change is how rewards are directed, not how tokens convert. Under the old system, veAERO and veVELO holders voted once a week to steer emissions. Aero replaces that vote with sAERO, a staked token whose holders allocate rewards in real time across any of seven networks, Base, Ethereum mainnet, OP Mainnet, Arc, Ink, Robinhood Chain, and Arbitrum, in a single transaction while paying gas only on Base. A 47-hour cooldown governs allocation changes at launch. The bet is that continuous, cross-chain allocation routes liquidity more precisely than a weekly vote ever could.
That is where the real significance sits. Aerodrome and Velodrome share a common codebase and hold parallel roles on two of Ethereum’s busiest rollups; folding them into one venue removes a duplicated liquidity competition and gives the combined system a single point of control over where emissions flow. Exchanges keep their own schedules, and Aero says it has coordinated the upgrade with major exchanges, but the protocol itself changes on a fixed timestamp, and the responsibility to migrate rests with each holder.
None of this predicts a price. A fixed conversion rate says nothing about where AERO will trade after launch, and an expected realized annual inflation of roughly 12 percent, with a 20 percent ceiling, means the new supply will keep growing. What the merger settles on day one is structural: two liquidity layers become one, and participants who want to keep earning have a clear, manual migration in front of them.
Source: BlockchainReporter.