Aerodrome, the largest DEX on the Optimism Superchain, needed an interoperability solution to grow market share via access to users across numerous chains, support more pairs to increase volume, and improve execution with deeper liquidity. As a cross-chain DEX, interoperability across chains is core to Aerodrome's design, and the team required infrastructure that was fully open and permissionless, to maintain sovreigntey over their product.

At a feature level, they wanted to increase coverage and flows by enabling pairs requiring routes across chains, improve liquidity and fill rates by optimizing LP allocations across pools in various L2s, and MEV-protect swaps for better execution quality. Ideally, all this would be accomplished with simple one-click UI/UX for both traders swapping assets, and LPs allocating emissions across chains.

Hyperlane is open, modular, and extensible by design, and Aerodrome stacks numerous features in their implementation. For traders, they enable coverage of all cross-chain routes using OpenUSDT, a Hyperlane-optimized version of Tether USDT, as an intermediate settlement asset bridged through Hyperlane Warp Routes (HWR). Interchain Accounts trigger destination-chain calls from within the initial origin-chain transaction, making for a seamless, one-click experience, while a custom Interchain Security Module (ISM) obscures swap data until final execution, to MEV-protect trades.

On the maker side of the market, Aerodrome uses Hyperlane General Message Passing (GMP) to make their veAERO-based liquidity allocation mechanism function across multiple chains. Stakers allocate emissions to any Aerodrome-supported chain, and these calls for AERO issuance direct AERO tokens cross-chain via Hyperlane Warp Routes (HWR). This functionality works well because AERO is issued as a Hyperlane Warp Asset (HWA), part of Hyperlane's multi-chain framework for asset issuance.

Most importantly for Aerodrome, all of this functionality is part of Hyperlane's framework, which is free to deploy across 130+ chains, including the full Superchain ecosystem. This means Aerodrome comfortably embedded Hyperlane infastructure deep in their protocol mechanisms, without risk to protocol sovreignty or being subject to future rent-seeking. They rely only on the protocol's agent relayers and economic security, both of which can be leveraged directly by VAerdrome without a third-party dependency.

Aerodrome's cross-chain Superswaps are live with seamless MEV-resistant cross-chain trading among nine chains, one-signature transactions for superior UI/UX, and smooth liquidity allocation across chains. Tens of thousands of cross-chain messages reliably run through Hyperlane each month supporting billions of Aerodrome swap volume.