Aerodrome co-founder says spot exchanges did $5B in fees in 2025, plans multi-chain launch

Cutler frames spot exchanges as crypto's biggest untapped opportunity

Alex Cutler, co-founder of Aerodrome, opens by noting that spot exchanges did roughly $5 billion in fees in 2025, a figure he says is close to the combined fees generated by lending, chains and derivatives. He argues the market has focused heavily on derivatives platforms like Hyperliquid, which he calls the "on-chain CME," but that no one has yet built the equivalent "on-chain NYSE or Nasdaq" for spot markets, especially as tokenized real-world assets such as stocks move on-chain and need deep, authentic liquidity rather than derivative wrappers.

He frames the moment as particularly important as tokenized equities and FX come on-chain, because these assets don't trade in 24/7 venues and need spot liquidity as their pricing foundation.

"We need an on-chain NYSE or Nasdaq... deeply liquid spot markets, real world assets in them."

Aerodrome's multi-chain expansion and revenue claims

Cutler details that the new version of Aerodrome goes live in about two weeks on Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Robinhood Chain, and Ethereum mainnet, unifying liquidity under a single token that claims 100% of the exchange's current and future value. He says Aerodrome currently exists on one chain that does about 15% of on-chain spot volume, yet claims the protocol has generated more revenue over the past 30 days, year-to-date, and in its lifetime than any other spot exchange.

He attributes this to liquidity provider economics: Aerodrome pays out a higher share of trading value to LPs than incumbents.

"Do you want to get paid about 50 on the dollar, a dollar, or 75 cents on a dollar?"

He says this same model won Aerodrome dominant share on Optimism and then Base against "billion-dollar incumbents," and expects the same dynamic on the new chains, including Robinhood, where he says market makers and projects have been asking the team to deploy for some time.

Different liquidity profiles across chains and growth targets

Cutler expects chain composition to differ: Base is weighted toward blue-chip, FX and tokenized stock liquidity; Ethereum mainnet toward blue-chip pairs, ETH, Bitcoin and RWAs; Robinhood Chain toward "long tail" memes and launchers for now. He says Aerodrome's share of on-chain stock volume in AMMs rose from 1/50 to about 1/3 over the past 30 days, and that it is already the number one on-chain FX and Bitcoin venue.

On revenue-to-volume correlation, he says the relationship is direct in aggregate across all spot volumes, but not uniform by vertical: stable or correlated pairs carry high TVL but low fees, making them cheap to win over, while long-tail pairs on chains like Robinhood could move fee totals more. He sets a goal of at least doubling Aerodrome's share of on-chain spot volume by year end, while saying it "could go much bigger than that" depending on what happens next.