Following suspicious trading activity during Venice’s VVV token launch, Aerodrome Finance took immediate action by suspending two contributors, earning praise for transparency.
By Temitope Olatunji
Edited by Marco T. Lanz
Updated
3 mins read
Aerodrome Finance announced on its X platform that it suspended two contributors due to insider trading allegations during the launch of Venice’s VVV token.
The Aerodrome Finance team explained that internal monitoring flagged suspicious trading activity within 30 minutes of the VVV launch, triggering an internal investigation. This led to the suspension of two contributors within three hours. The team said:
“The timing of a small percentage of the trading activity around the VVV launch was flagged by internal monitoring in less than 30 minutes – triggering an internal investigation. This investigation resulted in the suspension of two contributors within three hours of launch. We are continuing the investigation and will take all appropriate further action.”
Erik Voorhees, the founder of Venice, commended the Aerodrome team for their transparency, noting that his company was immediately notified when the issue was discovered.
Really appreciate Aerodrome's transparency on this. They reached out and let us know when they found out. Been great to work with them 🙏
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) January 28, 2025
Additionally, many users have praised Aerodrome’s swift response, with one user noting that the exchange is upholding a high standard. Aerodrome, a decentralized exchange on Base, dominates the total value locked on Base, with a TVL of $1.04 billion according to DeFiLlama.
Venice launched VVV on Base, an Ethereum Layer 2 network backed by Coinbase, on January 27. Liquidity is provided through a public pool on Aerodrome, with half of the 100 million tokens allocated to Venice users and web3 AI projects on Base. According to Venice, VVV aims to simplify economic interactions for agents. Through staking, agents gain access to generative text, images, and coding, moving away from pay-per-request models by offering stakers a portion of the platform’s growing computational resources.
The team noted that VVV is the first airdrop focusing on AI agents, with 25% of the initial supply allocated to AI community protocol accounts on the Base blockchain. Venice explained:
“VVV is designed primarily for agents, to reduce economic friction. When staking, Agents now enjoy a persistent inference resource for generative text, image, & code, at scale, without paying per request. VVV is the first airdrop targeting AI agents themselves: 25% of the genesis supply was allocated to AI community protocol accounts on the Base blockchain.”
Since its launch in May 2024, Venice has attracted 400,000 registered users, maintains 50,000 daily active users, and processes 15,000 inference requests per hour. Cookie DAO, an index and central data layer for AI agents and DEFAI, reported that within 24 hours of the VVV launch, it gained 18.32% of the total mindshare with more than 21,000 holders.
Temitope is a writer with more than four years of experience writing across various niches. He has a special interest in the fintech and blockchain spaces and enjoy writing articles in those areas. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in linguistics. When not writing, he trades forex and plays video games.
