Aerodrome V1

Rejected venues wait the longest for re-review; a rejection has to earn another look before the scheduled date.

Aerodrome V1 is an AMM and liquidity-incentive market on Base. DefiLlama recorded about $105.4M on 2026-08-14, so size does not decide this file. Providing liquidity means holding two assets whose ratio the market rebalances against you: when prices diverge, the pool sells the winner and accumulates the loser, and the LP realises the shortfall against simply holding. That impermanent loss cannot be explained to this client in two sentences and is indefensible when it bites. The rejection covers the AMM category, not Aerodrome’s quality. A product without IL exposure would merit its own review.

Kill criteria: the events that revoke this verdict
• Ships a product line without impermanent-loss exposure that merits its own review

The research file

Mechanism

Aerodrome offers stable pools for correlated assets and constant-product volatile pools for uncorrelated assets; its current documentation also describes concentrated ranges. An LP contributes both pool assets and receives swap fees. Gauges can add weekly AERO emissions, but incentives compensate the inventory exposure rather than remove it.

Control and operating record

veAERO voters direct emissions among gauged pools, while documented emergency authority can pause or revive gauges and manage identifiers. Aerodrome publishes contracts and security materials. No incident-free conclusion is inferred here: a pool also inherits both token contracts, Base settlement, oracles used by integrations, and the chosen pool factory.

Exit consequences

An unstaked LP can burn its receipt for its current pro-rata reserves; a gauged receipt must first be unstaked. The assets returned need not match the deposited mix because arbitrage continuously changes pool inventory. Concentrated positions can stop earning fees outside their range, and sale or rebalance realizes the changed inventory.

Why the class rule decides

The return requires continuously making a two-sided market. Stable-asset correlation may reduce divergence but does not eliminate depeg or inventory loss; emissions can disappear by vote. The AMM-LP class therefore decides independently of Aerodrome’s size or engineering quality. Only a separable product without LP inventory exposure reopens review.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

• Aerodrome Docs — liquidity pool designs · primary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: stable and volatile pools, constant-product invariant, concentrated ranges, fee APR
• Aerodrome Docs — emissions, gauges and veAERO · primary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: AERO emissions, gauge voting, LP incentives
• DefiLlama — Aerodrome V1 survey record · secondary · accessed 2026-08-14
  Supports: survey TVL, Base deployment, protocol category

Inherited controls

The verdict above grades the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The least safe layer sets the position’s grade, and the position table names which one that is.