TechFlowPost has published an analysis arguing that Coinbase’s push into tokenized stocks on Base could make Aerodrome, or Aero, one of the clearest on-chain beneficiaries. The piece, written by ethplant and translated by TechFlow, presents Aero as a potentially underpriced asset and lays out a broad bull case covering tokenized stocks today, a 2030 projection, Aero’s competitive position, merger and emissions assumptions, and revenue and valuation scenarios.
Coinbase is expected to launch tokenized stocks on Base
The article says Coinbase could launch its own tokenized stock product on Base as early as this week. According to the piece, those tokens would be backed 1:1 by shares, giving holders real equity ownership and access to the benefits tied to that ownership, including dividend upside.
The author notes that tokenized stocks are not new to crypto markets. Robinhood, xStocks, Ondo Finance, and Binance have already introduced similar products and, in the author’s view, have shown strong signs of adoption. The article adds that those products operate under U.S. regulatory limits and use debt-based or wrapped structures, which it distinguishes from the Coinbase product described in the piece.
From there, the author argues that a Coinbase launch on Base could pull more stock trading on-chain and, by extension, benefit Aero, which the article describes as the largest and most competitive DEX on Base.
Tokenized stock DEX volume has risen sharply over the past year
The article cites July 2025 spot DEX volume for tokenized stocks at just $115 million. One year later, it says AMM-based tokenized stock volume in the on-chain economy had climbed to more than $6 billion, a more than 50-fold increase year over year.
It also says tokenized assets accounted for 1% of all spot DEX volume in July 2025 and now represent 11%. Even with that jump, the author argues the category is still at a very early stage compared with what the market may look like later on.
Using July 2026 data, the article puts tokenized stock spot DEX trading at a $72 billion annualized run rate. As a comparison point, it says MEME coins alone generated more than $775 billion in spot DEX volume in 2025. The author’s conclusion is that tokenized stocks have already produced meaningful trading value even though on-chain investable assets remain limited, and that the category could eventually overtake MEME coins and some crypto-native assets as more equities come on-chain and composability drives more activity.
The gap is much larger when measured against the U.S. equity market. The piece says U.S. stock market trading volume totaled about $200 trillion in 2025. Based on the current $72 billion annualized rate, less than 0.04% of all U.S. stock trading is happening on-chain today.
That is why, in the author’s telling, tokenized stocks remain in the earliest phase of adoption even though Robinhood, Binance, xStocks, and now Coinbase are already offering products before the regulatory picture is fully settled, including possible clarity through the Clarity Act and or SEC rulemaking.
Why the author thinks DEXs may capture a large share of the upside
The article says the whole crypto market could benefit from tokenized stocks, but singles out spot decentralized exchanges as one of the biggest possible winners. The reasoning is straightforward: as more investable assets move on-chain, trading volume could grow faster than it does in traditional finance because on-chain assets may turn over more often.
The piece points to 2025 U.S. stock market volume of $200 trillion against a market capitalization of $69 trillion, implying turnover of about 3x. The author believes tokenized stocks can sustain higher turnover because of features specific to on-chain markets.
First, markets are open 24/7, which means price discovery can happen at any hour and create more trading opportunities. Second, crypto composability can raise the speed of capital because assets can move across lending, liquidity provision, yield strategies, and collateral use between protocols. The article contrasts that with traditional finance, where stocks are typically held inside a single brokerage system. Third, the author says agentic finance could support large-scale automated trading, with bots submitting orders on-chain at a scale far beyond manual human activity.
The article also cites Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said, 「到本十年末，全球 GDP 的多达 10% 可能运行在加密轨道上」. The author describes that statement as bold, much like Armstrong’s separate prediction of $1 million BTC by 2030, but says such targets cannot be ruled out given the compound growth seen across the on-chain economy.
The article’s 2030 tokenized stock model
The model in the piece has two parts. The first projects U.S. equities and stocks in the rest of the world using growth-rate assumptions. The second estimates on-chain penetration for U.S. stocks and turnover for tokenized equities, then derives potential trading volume from those inputs.
On market size, the article says its stock market capitalization assumptions are based on 10-year CAGR figures for U.S. and non-U.S. equities. It adds that if AI continues to accelerate productivity and becomes more advanced, U.S. equities could grow beyond the model’s $111 trillion figure.
For initial turnover, the piece says tokenized stocks reached $6 billion in monthly DEX volume by the end of July 2026 with only about $2.5 billion in tokenized stock assets outstanding. Annualized, that implies $72 billion in trading volume and turnover that could be as high as 30x per year. The author expects turnover to decline as circulation and market value expand, since a larger share of assets may sit idle over time, but still remain above traditional market levels for the reasons already laid out.
On penetration, the article expects tokenized stocks to post especially strong growth in 2027 and 2028 as regulation becomes clearer and traditional financial firms integrate more deeply with on-chain markets. Because tokenized stocks start from a very small share of the broader stock market, the author says explosive growth would not be unusual.
The piece gives a near-term estimate for 2026 as well. With about $2.5 billion in tokenized stocks outstanding now and roughly 4.5 months left in the year, the author says a year-end market cap of $7.5 billion is reasonable if Robinhood keeps promoting its chain and Coinbase expands tokenized stock listings. The article does not expect full-year 2026 trading volume to hit $190 billion, but says a $15 billion monthly figure by December 2026, equivalent to a year-end annualized run rate, would not be far-fetched given that July already reached $6 billion despite regulatory uncertainty.
For 2030, the author sets a target of $8.3 trillion in tokenized stocks. The article says that would amount to about 7.5% of U.S. equity market cap or about 3.5% of global equities. The base case behind that estimate is that crypto becomes an inseparable part of the financial system, making it plausible that 3.5% of global stocks end up tokenized over the next several years.
Why the piece sees Aero as a direct beneficiary
The article cites Dromos Labs CEO Alexander Cutler, who said in an interview that Aero’s goal is to become 「代币化股票的头号链上场所」.
It argues that Aerodrome already holds the strongest position on Base. In the second quarter of 2026, according to the piece, Aerodrome captured 52% of spot DEX volume on the chain, ahead of Uniswap at 26% and PancakeSwap at 12%. If Aero can keep attracting liquidity and volume the way it has so far, the author says tokenized stocks could become an important catalyst for AERO.
The mechanism described in the article is liquidity formation. As tokenized stocks arrive on Base, Coinbase will need deep on-chain liquidity so trading pools can support smooth execution. The author says Aero’s incentives are particularly well suited to direct capital into those pools because token holders can vote emissions toward them, allowing liquidity providers to be attracted even before fees become meaningful.
As evidence, the piece points to Aero’s work with Coinbase around cbBTC liquidity on Base. It says those efforts have shown up in market-share data: in July 2026, Aerodrome accounted for 54% of BTC-USD DEX volume, more than all other EVM DEXs combined, while the rest of the market represented 46%.
Merger timing and token emissions in the model
The article updates earlier assumptions around the merger between Aerodrome and Velodrome. It says the expected merger timing moved from July 2026 to September 2026. The author speculates that the Aero merger could happen on or before Sept. 16, 2026, because Aero is expected to run on Arc Mainnet from day one and the public audit competition is expected to end on Sept. 11, 2026.
The emissions outlook was revised as well. Instead of assuming a fixed annual emissions rate of 13%, the updated model starts at 17% and lowers that figure by 2 percentage points each year until it reaches 11%. The author calls that change more conservative, saying a global rewards cap is expected to keep inflation below 20%, while the Aero team’s own estimate is in the 8% to 12% range.
For the pre-merger weekly epoch model, the article uses these assumptions:
- Aerodrome: fixed weekly emissions of 0.25% and a 50.0% lock rate.
- Velodrome: fixed weekly emissions of 0.32%, with the lock rate falling by 0.2 percentage points per week from 50.1% at Epoch 221 for conservative modeling.
For the transition to Aero, the article says total Aero supply equals total Aerodrome supply divided by 0.945. Aerodrome holders convert 1:1, while Velodrome holders convert into roughly 5.5% of total supply.
Post-merger, the piece says Aero’s supply and valuation projections are still mainly driven by lock percentage and emissions percentage. The author keeps a conservative assumption that the lock rate falls by 2 percentage points per year, but adds that a material decline would be surprising given the team’s actions and strong incentives for continued locking. In the author’s view, a rising lock percentage over time may be more likely if more participants prefer fee income over quick selling.
The article also says recent protocol updates have focused on more efficient emissions and a buy-and-burn mechanism, which could slow total supply growth relative to what the model implies, especially if the team’s 8% to 12% inflation estimate proves accurate.
As in the author’s earlier work, Aero emissions are described as “productive” because they reward the most important participants on a DEX, liquidity providers. Even so, the piece says token inflation still needs to be monitored to understand the long-term impact on price.
Revenue and valuation assumptions
The valuation section is explicitly framed as a bull case for Aero under the assumption that EVM remains the dominant environment and tokenized assets accelerate over the next few years. The author points readers seeking a more conservative view to an earlier article titled $AERO: Why the Market Is Pricing It Wrong.
The five-year model in this article has three parts. First, it projects DEX volume by trading-pair category using growth assumptions. Second, it estimates Aero revenue based on the projected share of EVM DEX volume captured by Aerodrome and a revenue rate tied to that volume. Third, it applies revenue multiples alongside the token-supply projections discussed earlier to produce a valuation framework.
The author says growth in tokenized asset volume is the main driver in the DEX analysis. To keep the model conservative, that volume is drawn only from the tokenized stock projections discussed earlier in the article. It does not include additional activity that could come from other tokenized real-world assets, with tokenized commodities given as one example.
Overall, the model assumes DEX trading volume in 2030 will be about 17 times the 2025 level. The article says a 76% CAGR is achievable because regulation is likely to become clearer and financial institutions are showing increasing interest in on-chain products. In the author’s view, the market is still in the early phase of a tokenization supercycle.
The piece also says EVM DEXs currently hold about 60% market share, which feeds into the implied token-price analysis. Using annualized July 2026 revenue of $54.5 million and a market capitalization of $423 million, the article derives an implied revenue multiple of roughly 8x. It adds that revenue multiples could compress as the industry matures, which is reflected in the model.
The author includes a warning about long-range financial modeling, writing that the only thing 100% certain about a long-term model is that it will be wrong. The point, the article says, is not to predict the future with precision but to understand the direction an investment could take if a given set of assumptions holds.
The piece adds another caveat: the model does not include any yield earned by holding the token. Even with annual inflation between 11% and 17%, the author says buyers who purchase AERO now and hold through 2030 could still see returns above 4,000%, or about 153% annualized, if the scenario plays out as modeled. Returns could be higher if holders choose to lock their tokens during that period.
Closing remarks and disclaimer
The article closes by citing Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who said, 「我们正处于全球代币化超级周期的早期」. The author argues that the fact Coinbase, described in the piece as the most crypto-focused U.S. company, is only now bringing tokenized stocks to Base suggests the financial system’s transition on-chain is still in its opening stages.
The final argument is that Aerodrome’s expansion across the wider EVM ecosystem comes at a time when deep on-chain liquidity and effective incentive mechanisms are becoming critical for competing with traditional finance. Tokenized stocks, in the author’s view, represent a major opportunity for DEX volume growth and could translate into billions of dollars in annual fee revenue. On that basis, the article says Aero may be one of the most underpriced opportunities in the crypto market today.
The piece ends with a disclaimer stating that the views expressed are the author’s alone and do not constitute investment advice, and that readers should do their own research.
