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

Alex Cutler sees spot exchanges as one of crypto’s largest opportunities as trillions of dollars of assets move on-chain. He said spot exchanges generated about $5 billion in fees in 2025, close to the combined fees from lending, chains, and derivatives. The opportunity, in his view, is to expand beyond today’s crypto spot markets into tokenized stocks, foreign exchange, and other assets.

Robbie suggested that the ratio of perpetual futures to spot trading may be near a local high and could shift toward spot as more asset classes, especially equities, are tokenized. Cutler’s case is that tokenized stocks require deep, liquid spot markets for the underlying assets. Such venues could become on-chain equivalents of the NYSE or Nasdaq and provide a foundation on which derivatives can develop. Hyperliquid has demonstrated demand for on-chain derivatives, he said, but the stock-exchange vertical has not yet produced an equivalent.

Cutler described the exchange’s addressable spot market as potentially four times larger than its current opportunity, including tokenized stocks and FX. He said it currently serves about 15% of its addressable spot market, while aiming to expand as new assets and markets come on-chain. Its upcoming Arrow deployment is intended to make it a definitive spot exchange for Ethereum and the broader on-chain economy, with deployments planned on Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Robinhood, and Ethereum mainnet. The launch was scheduled for about two weeks after the episode; Cutler said the team intends to operate wherever new tokens are issued or traded, including Robinhood’s chain.

Cutler said the exchange generated more revenue than any other spot exchange over the preceding 30 days, year to date, and across its lifetime, despite serving about 15% of the market. He said it was not the first exchange on Base, but gained share with a better product and now handles 60–70% of on-chain volume there. Across on-chain AMM spot volume, he said its share grew from one-fiftieth to about one-third over the preceding 30 days. He also described it as the leading on-chain FX venue and the leading on-chain Bitcoin venue.

Arrow will use the team’s third and most ambitious DEX operating system, according to Cutler. The exchange’s strategy is to capture its productive value in the exchange token, which he said is intended to represent a 100% claim on the exchange’s current and future productive value. The team plans to use that value to reward liquidity providers in addition to trading fees, on the premise that attracting liquidity can bring more trades and fees. Cutler expects liquidity and volume to migrate quickly in some new markets, though initial pools with little total value locked may offer very high APRs.

The team plans to tailor its approach to each chain’s activity while prioritizing deep, efficient liquidity in its strongest pairs. Cutler said its aim is to at least double its share of on-chain spot volume by year-end, and to rank first in volume, fees, and total value locked; he said it is already number one in revenue. He cautioned that spot volume and revenue should be related but that winning a vertical does not guarantee proportional revenue growth. Stable-stable and correlated-asset pools, for example, can attract substantial TVL and volume while generating relatively little fee revenue.