BASE’S NEW FANBASE: Just as the Friend.tech fad faded, sapping some of the post-launch adoration of Coinbase’s new Base layer-2 blockchain (as chronicled in last week’s The Protocol), there’s a new kid in town: Aerodrome Finance. The platform, which markets itself as the Base ecosystem’s “premiere liquidity engine and hub,” has quickly attracted more than $170 million of TVL or “total value locked,” helping to push the overall TVL of protocols on Base to more than $400 million. The secret? According to the newsletter Wu Blockchain, the project’s “native token, $AERO, offers liquidity mining rewards with an annualized yield close to 1,000% without compounding.” That’s a lot, even in crypto. Aerodrome’s TVL has now exceeded – “flippened” in crypto jargon – the $158 million on Velodrome, Aerodome’s predecessor project, which sits on the older layer-2 chain Optimism. Is it sustainable? “Money doesn’t materialize out of thin air,” Wu Blockchain noted dryly, so “it’s worth considering when this spiral might come to an end.” (A Base zit: On Tuesday, the network suffered a “major outage” that lasted a little over three hours, its biggest glitch since the launch last month.)