Velodrome AMM Launches Airdrop on Optimism

On June 1, automated market maker Velodrome launched an airdrop of its $VELO governance token on Optimism.

Eligible users can claim their airdrop at https://airdrop.velodrome.finance/.

The move comes a day after Optimism, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum, kicked off the first phase of its own $OP airdrop.

$OP is Live! A Guide To Claiming The Airdrop

$OP is Live! A Guide To Claiming The Airdrop

A step-by-step guide to claiming Optimism's $OP airdrop.

The Defiant

The majority (60%) of the VELO supply has been allocated to the community. Airdrop recipients include WEVE holders, Optimism network users, and users of various DeFi protocols. A full list can be found here.

Partner protocols building on Optimism will receive 24% of the VELO supply. These include Aave, AlchemixFi, Fei, Frax, Hop, inverse Finance, Lido, Lura, MakerDAO, Optimism, Perpetual Protocol, Redacted Cartel, Synthetic, and Thales Protocol.

Improvements On Solidly

Velodrome is a newly launched trading and liquidity marketplace designed to provide deep liquidity and low fee/slippage trades. Velodrome is supposed to be an improved version of the Solidly Exchange launched by Yearn founder Andre Cronje.

Andre designed Solidly to be an AMM optimized to facilitate the swapping of both stable and volatile assets; like Curve, those who lock their governance tokens can vote to steer emissions to their desired liquidity pools and receive a cut of protocol fee revenue. Solidly never truly got tested due to issues including bugs leaving key features broken, the distribution being too concentrated, and a general downturn in the Fantom ecosystem after Cronje quit DeFi.

Velodrome aims to improve on many of Solidly’s issues with regards to distribution, emissions and whitelisting token pairs. VELO can be locked for veVELO, which confers voting rights. Voters then determine the flow of VELO emissions to the various liquidity pools.

The Optimism team will receive 5% of the VELO supply in an attempt to align incentives and shore up support for Velodrome.