In 2022, the executives at Dromos Labs met in a Discord server. They built Velodrome and Aerodrome, the top decentralised exchanges on Optimism and Base. On Wednesday, at an event overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park and the luxury towers of Billionaire’s Row, they unveiled their next product: a new exchange called Aero, which will mark their first expansion to Ethereum. Alexander Cutler, the CEO, just learned his colleagues’ names last month. “We basically maintained that anonymity on the team almost all the way up to this point,” he told DL News in an interview on Thursday. It’s a very crypto story — standard fare in an industry born in an online cypherpunk forum. But so was their decision to dox themselves. Crypto is being embraced by the White House and the titans of traditional finance. Building permissionless financial services no longer carries the risk that it did in years past. And building in public can assuage lawmakers and executives wary of dealing with pseudonymous developers. “We believe we do have a direct shot at being the largest exchange to service this onchain economy,” Cutler said. “We have an amazing talent group, and now is the time, I think, to go out and show it.” Set to launch in 2026, Aero will simplify the arduous process of swapping tokens across different blockchains and prove more efficient at luring the investors who provide liquidity, according to Dromos Labs executives. That liquidity, in turn, will allow Aero to offer crypto traders better prices than its competitors.Cutler hasn’t been shy about saying so. On social media, has repeatedly skewered Uniswap’s recently-announced plan to divert a portion of protocol revenue from liquidity providers to tokenholders.Uniswap is the world’s largest decentralised exchange. It processed $99 billion in transactions over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama data. Of that, $42 billion came from transactions on Ethereum. Cuter said needling a competitor was common in the broader tech world, pointing to the Apple-versus-Microsoft feud of his youth.“When we are on the bleeding edge of things, I think it is very natural to benchmark,” he said. “That sort of benchmarking is, I think, just a way to clearly communicate the value and the benefits of your product over another one.”But it rubbed some the wrong way. A former Uniswap delegate called Dromos Labs’ announcement “impressive” but underwhelming, given the trash talk leading up to it. While he’s engaged with a handful of critics online, Cutler said the response to Aero and the technology behind it has been “overwhelmingly positive.” “There are a ton of projects, a ton of builders, a ton of partners of ours who have been asking for this type of expansion, asking for these types of upgrades,” he said. “MetaSwaps, which is, for the first time ever, a single product that combines a bridge, a liquidity aggregator, and a simple swapping interface into just one product — folks were like, ‘Finally! Where has this been?’” The executive said he’s heard the critics who found Wednesday’s event too “polished.” Some sarcastically compared it to the unveiling of the iPhone — a product that changed the world as we know it. “I think the bar is very low in this industry,” Cutler said .“I think it is the right time for folks like us, who are building the products that will power the new onchain economy, to go out and set the bar so much higher, because the goal is to bring 10% of global GDP on chain.”Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com. In 2022, the executives at Dromos Labs met in a Discord server. They built Velodrome and Aerodrome, the top decentralised exchanges on Optimism and Base. On Wednesday, at an event overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park and the luxury towers of Billionaire’s Row, they unveiled their next product: a new exchange called Aero, which will mark their first expansion to Ethereum. Alexander Cutler, the CEO, just learned his colleagues’ names last month. “We basically maintained that anonymity on the team almost all the way up to this point,” he told DL News in an interview on Thursday. It’s a very crypto story — standard fare in an industry born in an online cypherpunk forum. But so was their decision to dox themselves. Crypto is being embraced by the White House and the titans of traditional finance. Building permissionless financial services no longer carries the risk that it did in years past. And building in public can assuage lawmakers and executives wary of dealing with pseudonymous developers. “We believe we do have a direct shot at being the largest exchange to service this onchain economy,” Cutler said. “We have an amazing talent group, and now is the time, I think, to go out and show it.” Set to launch in 2026, Aero will simplify the arduous process of swapping tokens across different blockchains and prove more efficient at luring the investors who provide liquidity, according to Dromos Labs executives. That liquidity, in turn, will allow Aero to offer crypto traders better prices than its competitors.Cutler hasn’t been shy about saying so. On social media, has repeatedly skewered Uniswap’s recently-announced plan to divert a portion of protocol revenue from liquidity providers to tokenholders.Uniswap is the world’s largest decentralised exchange. It processed $99 billion in transactions over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama data. Of that, $42 billion came from transactions on Ethereum. Cuter said needling a competitor was common in the broader tech world, pointing to the Apple-versus-Microsoft feud of his youth.“When we are on the bleeding edge of things, I think it is very natural to benchmark,” he said. “That sort of benchmarking is, I think, just a way to clearly communicate the value and the benefits of your product over another one.”But it rubbed some the wrong way. A former Uniswap delegate called Dromos Labs’ announcement “impressive” but underwhelming, given the trash talk leading up to it. While he’s engaged with a handful of critics online, Cutler said the response to Aero and the technology behind it has been “overwhelmingly positive.” “There are a ton of projects, a ton of builders, a ton of partners of ours who have been asking for this type of expansion, asking for these types of upgrades,” he said. “MetaSwaps, which is, for the first time ever, a single product that combines a bridge, a liquidity aggregator, and a simple swapping interface into just one product — folks were like, ‘Finally! Where has this been?’” The executive said he’s heard the critics who found Wednesday’s event too “polished.” Some sarcastically compared it to the unveiling of the iPhone — a product that changed the world as we know it. “I think the bar is very low in this industry,” Cutler said .“I think it is the right time for folks like us, who are building the products that will power the new onchain economy, to go out and set the bar so much higher, because the goal is to bring 10% of global GDP on chain.”Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.

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