How should those who build and maintain decentralized systems be compensated, and how can we ensure their incentives remain tightly coupled to the long-term health of their organizations? This challenge, which we call the Alignment Trilemma, has long shaped institutional design. But in traditional systems, the tradeoffs are structural and persistent. As a firm scales, it almost inevitably deprioritizes one of these groups—and it’s rarely the teams. Decentralized systems offer an opportunity to

The MetaDEX continuously rewards active participants, aligning liquidity providers and tokenholders around the DEX’s future success. Meanwhile, a programmatic, immutable emissions schedule prevents reckless over‑issuance, and the built‑in cushion against downturns averts catastrophic liquidity collapses. In this way, “overpaying” in emissions doesn’t become a liability; it becomes a rational investment in the protocol’s long‑term trajectory.

A new decentralized onchain economy is being created, supported by blockchains and decentralized protocols that unlock new and competitive financial and organizational structures. A new paradigm requires new tools to consistently measure and evaluate these systems. In Part 1: On DEXs, Dromos examined the evolution of decentralized exchanges, demonstrating how models to date have not effectively solved for the DEX Trilemma. In Part 2: On the Token, Dromos showed how the MetaDEX model solves fo...

Kicking off this series on the MetaDEX, Part 1: On DEXs breaks down the business model of a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) and outlines the core challenges leading DEXs have faced. The MetaDEX’s primary design change to address these challenges has been economic, and central to this change has been the token design. To introduce the MetaDEX, it is best to begin by discussing the role of the native token in DEXs. As shown in Curve’s example, a native token can have several key uses for a DEX. It...

AMM DEXs: the foundations of DeFiHow DEXs workDecentralized exchanges (DEXs) are a wholly new implementation of liquid markets and a fundamental primitive of entire Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystems. Unlike traditional centralized exchanges, which use a single entity to facilitate transactions and hold user funds, DEXs leverage automated market-makers (AMMs). AMMs allow trustless and permissionless token swapping. DEXs can play a pivotal role in growing the onchain ecosystem around them...

The MetaDEX is here and has already seen successThe MetaDEX is the DEX model underlying Aerodrome and Velodrome, the central trading and liquidity hubs on Base and Superchain. It combines the best features of Curve, Convex, and Uniswap into one streamlined, powerful design. The MetaDEX’s efficient liquidity pools and incentive system allow protocols to build deep liquidity on their tokens while offering traders exceptionally low slippage swaps. Aerodrome, as an example, has distributed over $...

Aerodrome is a MetaDEX, combining the best of Curve, Convex, and Uniswap into a single streamlined protocol uniquely designed to serve as the primary trading and liquidity hub of the Base ecosystem. By bringing the most important primitives under one roof, Aerodrome offers protocols and users on Base a complete platform for liquidity attraction, yield farming, and low-slippage swaps.