Tokenized Nvidia Priced Its Earnings While the Nasdaq Was Closed, Aerodrome’s CEO Says

The tokenized version of Nvidia stock did something the real one could not on Wednesday night: it kept trading after the Nasdaq closed, and it repriced on the company’s earnings hours before Wall Street could react.

Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, which builds the Aerodrome exchange on Coinbase’s Base network, described the moment on Unchained’s livestream on Thursday. “The stock market closed at a particular price,” he said on the show. But “on-chain markets continued to operate” that night, with “millions of volume pouring in” and “the price rising higher than the close.”

Public pool data supports him. Nvidia reported second-quarter results after the closing bell on Aug. 26, beating estimates with $2.22 in earnings per share on revenue of $96.2 billion, and guiding to roughly $108 billion for the current quarter. Nvidia shares had closed that day at $209.66, down 1.59%, and rose about 5% in after-hours trading.

On Base, Aerodrome’s NVDAc/USDC pool traded about $4.5 million in the four hours after the bell. The token opened that stretch near $209.87, touched a high of $220.66 in the hour the results landed, and ended the window at $219.80. The single hour after the release accounted for roughly $2.5 million of the volume. The on-chain price, in other words, arrived at close to the same number as the after-hours quote, without the Nasdaq open.

“The feature, not the bug”

The obvious worry about putting stocks on a blockchain is that the token drifts from the share when the underlying market is shut. Cutler argued the drift is the point, calling price dislocation while markets are closed “the feature, not the bug.”

He described Wednesday’s move as the market working rather than slipping: “That was on-chain markets participating in the act of discovering what they believe the opening price would be.”

He said the pools showed “liquidity providers positioning on either side in various weights” before the results landed, with the range tightening as the day arrived.

Cutler’s broader claim is that the composability matters more than the trading hours. “This is a better version of a stock, period, because of the programmability and the composability that comes with it,” he said, pointing to the nine DeFi protocols integrated at launch, among them Aave, Morpho and Euler.

Pressing on the weekend problem

The argument has a gap, and host Laura Shin went at it on the show: the price feed does not run when the market does not. Chainlink supplies the oracle for the tokens, and “it’s a 24/5 oracle, as far as I understand,” she said, raising the prospect of a significant dislocation from the underlying, thinner weekend liquidity, and “problems come Monday morning” for anyone using the tokens as collateral.

Cutler said on the show that he expected the oracle to go around the clock “very soon,” then immediately qualified it: he was “not super deep in the weeds” and was relaying what he had been told. His substantive answer was that lending markets should eventually price off the on-chain pools themselves rather than an off-chain feed from the Nasdaq, which requires those pools to be deep enough to liquidate against.

A launch that is still small

Coinbase launched tokenized Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet shares on Base on Aug. 24, backed one-for-one by shares held with a regulated custodian and unavailable to U.S. users. Cutler said on the show that the tokens represent real ownership rather than the synthetic wrappers that came before: “every token that you see today issued on Base, you know, it’s backed one by one by an actual share.”

On the show, he put Aerodrome’s share of the new market at “about twenty-five percent of the AMM volumes on these tokenized assets across all exchanges and chains and issuers,” or roughly $25 million in the prior 24 hours and about $80 million since launch, held by some 5,000 wallets. The share figure cannot be checked against a neutral source, because no public tally of tokenized-equity AMM volume across every chain and issuer exists. His volume figure is in line with public pool data: Nvidia’s pools on Base traded about $19.5 million over 24 hours, with Meta near $4.7 million and Alphabet near $3 million.

The absolute numbers remain modest against the market they aim at, and the tokens are still closed to American investors. Coinbase has applied for an SEC innovation exemption; Cutler predicted any eventual guidance would be “very synergistic” with what Coinbase has already built, with permissionless tokens on chain and identity checks reserved for shareholder functions like voting. He grounded that in what he called leaks out of the agency, which Unchained could not verify.

More assets are coming, he said, without naming them: “By this time next week, there will be a lot more, I guess, is what I can say.”

The race is crowded. Arcus, built by dYdX Labs, launched leveraged stock and crypto tokens on Robinhood Chain this week, and ICE and OKX have formed a joint venture to tokenize equities.

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/tokenized-nvidia-priced-its-earnings-while-the-nasdaq-was-closed-aerodromes-ceo-says\/#arve-youtube-qum_byq4w_e","@type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/QuM_Byq4W_E?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=1&autoplay=0"}

The post Tokenized Nvidia Priced Its Earnings While the Nasdaq Was Closed, Aerodrome’s CEO Says appeared first on Unchained.