Alex Cutler: Spot Exchanges Are The Biggest Opportunity In Crypto (Trillions Incoming)

Alex Cutler (0:00)

2025 Spot Exchanges did about $5 billion in fees, and that's close to the amount of fees generated by lending, by the chains, by derivatives combined.

Robbie Klages (0:11)

My name's Robby, and you're watching The Rollup, and today I'm asking you to please subscribe, comment, like and support our channel. We interview some of the best and brightest minds in digital assets, digital finance and tokenization. We are doing this for you, so please sit back, relax, enjoy the show and thank you so much for all your support. And we're back, DAS Asia 2026, live from Token 2049, my friend Alexander Cutler, the man of the hour, the man bringing tokenized equities to the masses, the man that is bringing liquidity to everyone and everything. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Cutler (0:49)

Good to see you, my friend.

Robbie Klages (0:49)

It's easy to do intros for you, man, because you're really doing it. You're really out here doing it, and I just can't tell you how excited I am to bring Aero, not only to Mainnet, but to bring it everywhere.

Alex Cutler (1:00)

Yeah, man.

Robbie Klages (1:01)

Give us an update.

Alex Cutler (1:02)

I mean, it's a crazy moment. As of this morning, we are two weeks away from launch.

Robbie Klages (1:08)

Let's go.

Alex Cutler (1:09)

This is a launch we've been building towards for over a year now.

We are super excited. The all new Aero will go live in about two weeks. It'll go live on Face, on Optimism, on Arbitrum, and of Robinhood, of course, and Mainnet Ethereum.

It's very much designed to be the single definitive spot exchange of not just Ethereum, but the on-chain economy. This is because we see spot exchange as the single biggest opportunity on-chain. Last year in 2025, spot exchanges did about $5 billion in fees. That's close to the amount of fees generated by lending, by the chains, by derivatives combined. So, you know, we want to go launch the big B3, connect liquidity together across networks, and dominate this moment in spot exchange when trillion-dollar markets are beginning to come on-chain.

Robbie Klages (2:08)

Yeah.

I'm really excited for this because I can't help. And look, we've got a Perps platform coming on just after you, but I feel like the ratio of expressing a thesis in a financial market the ratio of Perps to spot is maybe reaching a local top, and I think we might start to see that flip back. And I think especially as we're tokenizing additional asset classes and we're bringing high-quality equities in particular on-chain, I mean, the moment has never been more real than it is right now for this launch. Yeah.

Alex Cutler (2:44)

I mean, look, derivatives and in particular Hyperliquid, right, have proven that there is demand for these types of on-chain products.

Robbie Klages (2:53)

Yeah.

Alex Cutler (2:55)

But derivative markets allow you just to speculate, right, on the price of a given asset, right? It has to derive a price from something. Yeah. So especially when we are now tokenizing real-world assets, and we're bringing things like stocks on-chain that don't trade in 24-7 venues, we need, just as much as we have wanted, on-chain CME. We need an on-chain NYSE or NASDAQ, right? Because you need deeply liquid spot markets, real-world assets in them, things that actually represent the underlying. They aren't just derivatives or wrappers or things like that. And those will be the foundation on which these types of markets, I think, will make increasingly price in which even derivatives markets increasingly tap into. But yes, I think we've seen what's possible now with a derivative market like Hyperliquid that wraps 100% of the value and says, hey, look, we're the on-chain CME, come find us. You know, you can bet on the growth of the on-chain economy. I don't think anyone's yet done that for the stock exchange vertical, just as critical to the on-chain economy. So that's what we've been building for the last year to go to.

Robbie Klages (4:06)

Yeah, absolutely. And so take us through the sequence of events that have taken place.

Obviously, this was a big moment that you've been working towards for a long time. Aerodrome has been live on base. You guys have been absolutely crushing. And you made the decision. I saw audits wrapped up, no major holdups. So we're forging ahead. You mentioned that we're about two weeks away. And we will see on a number of chains, you mentioned Arbitrum, Robinhood, Optimism, Ethereum, Mainnet.

Give us a sense of what is going to unfold over the next two weeks as we ultimately culminate in this big Go Live moment.