GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s like a ‘crypto news bouncer’ for your inbox. Only the good stuff gets in.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Aero is coming for Robinhood Chain.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Wall Street Is Betting on Ethereum - So Why Isn't ETH Exploding?
- 🍪 Citi's Aave thesis.
Chainlink is bringing tokenized finance to New York. Attendance is by application, and seats are limited.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
AERO GOES FROM 1 CHAIN TO 7 TONIGHT ✈️
Tonight at 8 p.m. ET, Aerodrome and Velodrome merge into a single exchange called Aero, with one token (AERO).
Both are DEXs: Aerodrome lives on Base, while Velodrome lives on Optimism.
Instead of one chain each, Aero goes live on seven at once: Base, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Arc, Ink and Robinhood Chain.
If you hold AERO or VELO, here's what will happen:
- Old AERO converts 1:1 into the new token.
- Each VELO converts into ~0.044 AERO.
- AERO holders end up with ~94.5% of the new supply.
- Coinbase converts tokens on its exchange automatically, but if you hold your own, you'll need to use Aero's upgrade portal.
Aerodrome already does about half of all DEX trading on Base.
It's also the main hub for onchain foreign exchange (e.g. swapping digital dollars for digital euros), with $10B+ of Circle's euro stablecoin traded there.
Add Velodrome, and the pair handles ~17% of trading across Ethereum-based chains (which the team expects to triple after launch).
Though the bigger prize is tokenized stocks.
When Coinbase launched its stock tokens on Base in August, Aerodrome grabbed almost all of the action, handling ~$1.4B of the ~$1.5B traded over a 30-day stretch.
But Base is still the smallest slice of that market. 👇
Robinhood Chain does more stock-token trading than Base, and over the past 30 days it out-traded Base on total DEX volume too ($38.6B vs. $30.5B).
Uniswap has run the show there since day one, launching as Robinhood Chain's main exchange back in July.
Tonight, Aero walks onto Uniswap's home turf with Coinbase in its corner…
CHAINLINK IS BRINGING TOKENIZED FINANCE TO NEW YORK
Banks, asset managers, and market infrastructure firms are already putting financial assets onchain.
On October 29, Chainlink is bringing the people building that infrastructure together in New York for Link:NYC.
The focus? What’s already working, what’s still holding institutions back, and what’s next for tokenized assets and cross-chain settlement.
Attendance is by application, and seats are limited.
AERO GOES FROM 1 CHAIN TO 7 TONIGHT (P2) ✈️
But, wait - hold up…
Does any of this growth actually make its way to the people holding AERO?
Yes. Yes it does. And pretty directly.
100% of Aerodrome's trading fees go to people who lock up their AERO.
That came to ~$7.85M over the past 30 days, and ~$88M over the past year.
Meaning, with AERO's market cap at ~$800M, you're paying about 9 years of that revenue for the whole token, which is why John (our crypto analyst) reckons AERO looks undervalued.
Citrini Research likes it too, giving AERO a 7% weight in its new 15-token crypto portfolio (the one that leaves out BTC and ETH entirely, from yesterday).
Coinbase has skin in the game, too. Coinbase Ventures bought AERO on the open market and locked it up for four years, according to Alex Cutler (CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind Aero).
The catch is emissions:
That's the new AERO handed out as rewards to people who supply the tokens traders swap against.
And over the past 30 days, Aerodrome paid out more in rewards than holders earned in fees. 👇
Holders also get paid by projects that want rewards steered toward their pools, and Aero says holders took home $14.9M in September once you count those payments.
Tonight's upgrade takes a swing at that.
Instead of voting once a week on where rewards go, holders can now shift them in close to real time (Aero calls it Predictive Allocation), so more of them land on the pools earning the most fees.
In Aero's own testing, that roughly halved the share of rewards landing in the wrong pools.
The takeaway:
As of tonight, Aero will have six new chains to win business on.
The two things to watch from here are how much stock-token trading it pulls from Uniswap on Robinhood Chain, and whether holder earnings climb past what Aero pays out in rewards.
ICYMI: John bought AERO at ~$0.48 on Aug 31, and he's up ~67% on it today (while AERO itself still sits ~66% below its ~$2.32 all-time high).
That's what getting in early buys you: enough cushion to wait for the new model to show up in the numbers.
If you want John's next move on AERO the moment he makes it, try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Every $BTC to $ETH swap is a taxable event. But inside a crypto IRA, it generally isn't. Here's how Roth and Traditional crypto IRAs work (and the catches).*
JPMorgan puts a long-term number on Bitcoin: Its asset management arm's 2027 outlook assumes a 10% annual return for BTC over the next 10 to 15 years.
Citi's Aave thesis: Citi Research says AAVE could take on jobs moving tens of trillions in TradFi, as tokenized assets create demand to borrow against them.
Lyn Alden: "Being bearish on stocks basically means you're bullish on fiat," with deficits running at 7% of GDP.
Crypto holders never sell, but they do spend: ether(.)fi cardholders just passed $1B in card purchases and got $25.3M in cashback. See where it went.**
*this is sponsored content. **this is partner content.
