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

Base, a Layer 2 Ethereum network incubated at Coinbase, saw its total value (or user deposits) rise to almost $1 billion – doubling the network’s deposits since early March, which stood at $470 million.

According to DeFiLlama, the network’s TVL is up $970 million. Decentralized exchange Aerodrome accounts for almost half of Base’s TVL, contributing $424 million. Aerodrome’s TVL rose from $125 million in early February to now over $420 million, following a surge 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 in September 2023 as a forked version.

Since then, it has facilitated a large portion of the swaps on the Base network. This approach is similar to the strategy for OP Mainnet with Velodrome, which uses a series of decentralized financial incentives and vote-blocked governance.

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