Aerodrome Co-Founder: 90% of Top 100 Tokens Are Uninvestable (Here's Why)

**Robbie** (0:00)
What's going on, man?

**Alex Cutler** (0:01)
Not too much. Are you guys?

**Robbie** (0:03)
Good to see you.
Alrighty, man. First takeaways from DAS. How are you feeling? What's going on? How's the environment? Yeah.

**Alex Cutler** (0:13)
Well, first, I gotta say, I was watching you guys live streaming last week.

**Robbie** (0:18)
Ah, thanks.

**Alex Cutler** (0:19)
I am blown away by the amount of energy you guys have. I saw you live streaming the entire policy event last week. I'm seeing you here. Are you guys coming out to France?

**Robbie** (0:29)
Yes.

**Andy** (0:30)
Yes, we will. Flying out at the end of this week.

**Alex Cutler** (0:33)
I think you guys are the only folks that I look at, and I go, my God, I think they've got more energy than we do.

**Andy** (0:39)
So major kudos.

**Robbie** (0:41)
Appreciate it, man. I've been seeing a fellow friend, Austin Barak of Relayer Capital, bull posting Aero a lot on the timeline. Speaking about this UPOD concept with regards to the token design and the revenue design, we have a pretty firm belief that a lot of this fundamental based investing is returning back to the space. As you look around, there's more suits here than there are at pretty much just about any conference over the last couple years. These people want to invest in value.
How do you think about this? How do you think about creating value from the Aerodrome perspective? What is the Aerodrome investment thesis here?

**Alex Cutler** (1:21)
Yeah, I mean, I think we're in a transformative moment, right? And I think you saw that at the Policy Conference. You saw it with the guidance that we just got out of the major regulators. We see it at the cusp, perhaps, of getting clarity. We are moving, I think, from a time where the investment game was, you know, will this shit coin pump? Will this token with absolutely no fundamentals, will I be able to get in early enough and get out fast enough to make some money to a moment where people are actually going to be looking at, and we're going to have a new class of investors looking at, can I own the best infrastructure of this space? You know, what can I own that's going to accrue value as the space grows by an order of magnitude? What are those mechanisms? What does the token do? You know, what rights does it grant me? And I think as that maturing and new investor class comes in, that's going to cause a massive reshuffling of what's seen as investible assets versus not. Because, you know, 90% of the top 100 tokens right now by market cap don't redistribute any value whatsoever. Do you really think all the funds, all the suits, you know, walking around us today are going to come on chain and buy a token that's a functional meme coin? No, I think we're going to see a massive reshuffling in the top 100, and I think it's going to be oriented around how do I own a piece of the most valuable infrastructure of the on-chain economy?

**Andy** (2:48)
Incredible. Alex, obviously things have changed quite a bit. We're seeing more, you know, we're in suits, we've got quite a bit of institutions walking around here. As a DeFi founder and a prominent protocol in the landscape, I'm curious, what is your prerogative when it comes to these conferences? Are you here mostly connecting with the institutions, trying to get more institutional flow? Are you still trying to win more of the DeFi market share? What are you thinking about as you're here amongst the institutions?

**Alex Cutler** (3:15)
Yeah, I think we come to a place like DOS, of course, to connect with fellow builders, with funds, and with institutions. And I think what we're increasingly seeing is that when we're talking about funds and institutions, it is not just funds native to the space. It is banks, it is entirely new funds that are raising from new types of investors to come in and invest in the space. And then, of course, we're seeing a whole new class of asset issuers talking about RWAs, talking about tokenized equities, all this sort of stuff that they want to bring on chain. And so for us, as a team that believes that we want to be the unified liquidity layer for all of Ethereum, right? We want to be the exchange layer basically of the on-chain economy. We want to be there first stop because we know we can help them build liquidity, deeper liquidity better than anybody else in the space. We can give them distribution, right, across chain, you know, era when it goes live in Q2 will be the first truly interoperable decks across all of Ethereum, so we can do that for them. And so we just want to be here to help because we see the opportunity to make the on-chain economy the most dynamic, real time, always on marketplace in the entire world. And that's where you can go to trade everything from meme coins to merchant new digital assets to tokenized equities, settle FX transactions, all of this sort of stuff. And we want to be the rails on which people do that.