Aerodrome expands trading to tokenized global equities on Base

Aerodrome, the dominant decentralized exchange on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, has gone live with onchain trading pools for tokenized versions of some of the world’s most valuable stocks. Nvidia, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet are now tradeable around the clock as tokenized assets, and traders showed up fast: roughly $103 million in volume flowed through the pools in the days following the August 24 launch.

Daily trading volume peaked at approximately $27 million, and Aerodrome’s governance token AERO jumped about 11% to roughly $0.53 on the news.

How the tokenized stocks actually work

Each tokenized equity, denoted with a “c” suffix (NVDAc, AAPLc, METAc, GOOGLc), represents a 1:1 claim on actual shares held in regulated custody. The custodial framework runs through Alpaca under the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) regulatory umbrella, meaning every token minted corresponds to a real share sitting in a compliant account somewhere.

The tokens are built on Coinbase’s B20 standard, which is designed to handle the messy corporate-action stuff that makes traditional equity infrastructure so cumbersome. Stock splits, dividend distributions, and similar events get processed onchain rather than through the labyrinthine back-office plumbing of traditional brokerages.

The underlying asset stays in a vault; the digital representation moves freely across DeFi protocols. These tokens can plug into lending protocols like Aave, opening the door to borrowing against equity positions or earning yield by supplying tokenized stock as collateral.

US residents are excluded. The tokenized equities are available only to eligible users outside the United States.

Liquidity depth and early trading patterns

Aerodrome positioned itself as the primary liquidity venue for these assets from day one. The deepest initial pool belonged to NVDAc, which launched with approximately $957,000 in liquidity.

The $103 million in cumulative volume across all four pools in the early days suggests strong demand. Daily figures reached around $25 million in early reports before settling at the $27 million figure cited in more recent data.

On August 28, four days after launch, a project called Bankr rolled out an AI-agent-powered tool for managing liquidity positions in the tokenized stock pools. The tool lets users issue natural-language commands to adjust their positions, essentially letting someone type “rebalance my NVDAc position” instead of manually interacting with smart contracts.

Why this matters beyond the numbers

The 11% surge in AERO’s price reflects the market’s read on what this means for the protocol’s competitive positioning. Coinbase has indicated that more tokenized equities are on the way, suggesting this initial batch of four mega-cap stocks is a proof of concept rather than the final product roster.

The geographic restriction is the most significant limitation. Excluding US users from onchain equity trading removes the single largest pool of retail equity investors from the addressable market.

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