Aerodrome Faces Criticism Over Code License Amid Rapid Growth

Aerodrome Finance’s key metrics are surging, but it’s also taking heat from the co-founder of Sonic Labs, formerly Fantom, who says it is licensing and restricting the open-source code that it is based upon.

Andre Cronje of Sonic took to social media and said, “just saw a project with $1bn TVL and $1bn FDV that took my open source code (under GPL3) and slapped on a BUSL license. I can take not being credited, I can take them removing my name from the code, I can take them not mentioning me or the original project anywhere on their website or documentation and going to great lengths to rebrand certain concepts to avoid any association, but taking something from open source and making it restrictive and them making a lot of money from it... damn…”

Cronje is referencing Solidly, an open-sourced decentralized exchange model he wrote the code for in 2022. He continued in a separate thread in response to a now-deleted post and said, “when you take an open source license, slap on bsl and then deny others to use that same code... that's too much.”

BSL, or Business Source License, is a source-available software license that allows anyone to view the licensed code, but the licensor retains certain rights over the code’s commercial use.

Co-founder of Aerodrome, Alex Cutler, told The Defiant in an interview, “While Solidly the DEX itself that he launched didn’t work out, and Andre took some time off of DeFi, what we saw is that the thinking and the model was there. The core mechanics were there, it just needed a bit more work. We built from his foundations launching Velodrome initially and then Aerodrome.”

Aerodrome Metrics Soar

The criticism comes as Aerodrome reaches a new all-time high in total-value-locked (TVL) and daily active users (DAU). Aerodrome’s TVL is now at $1.1 billion, making it the fourth-largest DEX by market capitalization, according to DeFiLlama. DAU is also at fresh highs, with 27,000 active users on Thursday Oct. 3, compared to just 7,500 on Sept. 3.

Aerodrome is a so-called MetaDEX protocol that combines aspects of Uniswap, Curve Finance, and Convex, to be the leading liquidity and swap solution on Ethereum Layer 2, Base.

Alex Cutler recently posted a thread on social media, saying, “My biggest takeaway from Token2049 is that it is starting to sink in that the MetaDEX model has won. It offers the single best answer to the DEX trilemma, aligning the incentives of traders, LPs, and holders, and the results speak for themselves.”

Speaking on the MetaDEX model and Aerodrome’s growth spurt Cutler told The Defiant, “the model is coming into a more mature place. There is broader recognition that the model works very well, and is beginning to have a very dominant share of not just activity on Base and Optimism, but DeFi in general.”