Aave

Coinbase's tokenized US equities have crossed $1 billion in decentralized exchange volume on its Base network in roughly one month, a milestone the Base team announced on X on September 19, 2026, though the figure is vendor-sourced data from Base itself and the volume is strictly for non-US persons. The activity validates the B20 standard, a native ERC-20-compatible format launched on August 24, 2026 and built on Rust precompiles to handle compliance policies and pausable functions; tokenized stock spot DEX volume on Base has surged approximately 830% month-over-month, with Aerodrome, the Base-native DEX, accounting for roughly 85% of that activity, or about $852.7 million. Coinbase's model relies on direct 1:1 share ownership through Alpaca Securities as a regulated broker-custodian under the Abu Dhabi Global Market framework, giving token holders actual shareholder rights including dividends and voting, subject to eligibility, and it launched with DeFi integrations from day one including Aave, Morpho, Euler, 0x, 1inch, CoW Swap, and Wasabi. The SEC issued an Innovation Exemption, Press Release 2026-90, on September 17, 2026, a five-year conditional relief for tokenized NMS stocks that unlocks the US market provided tokenized stocks offer the same rights as the underlying securities and trading venues operate under permissioned access with OFAC compliance, and Coinbase Institutional said the framework to bring the same regulated onchain market infrastructure onshore just got clearer. Coinbase is not first to tokenize equities: Kraken's xStocks boasts $25 billion in cumulative volume, largely centralized-exchange-matched rather than on-chain DEX volume, Ondo Global Markets holds a $638 million total value locked and roughly a 58% share of the issuer market, and Binance's bStocks has reached $610 million in assets under management in just two months, while the total tokenized public equities market now sits at approximately $2.48 billion. Chainlink Data Feeds provide the pricing backbone with 24/5 continuous feeds, a 0.5% deviation threshold and 24-hour heartbeats reporting Total Return Values that account for dividends, even as Nasdaq, NYSE, and Cboe push back against tokenized equities over liquidity fragmentation and degraded price discovery during the 16 hours of overnight trading that on-chain markets enable, and SIFMA pushes for formal SEC rulemaking rather than exemptions.

Crypto wallet infrastructure provider Turnkey has launched two new products, Swaps and Earn, expanding beyond wallet creation and transaction signing into in-app trading and onchain lending. Swaps lets businesses embed crypto trading directly into their own interfaces, with Turnkey handling quote aggregation, routing and transaction execution while customers set their own fees; it covers 10 networks, including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Optimism, Monad and Solana, with more expected soon. Earn connects businesses to lending vaults across eight networks through the DeFi protocols Aave and Morpho, with Turnkey managing vault discovery, deposits and withdrawals, and allowing customers to take a share of the yield generated by user deposits as a recurring revenue stream. Turnkey said it has already processed more than $200 billion in stablecoin transaction volume, giving the new products an existing transaction infrastructure to build on. The launch comes as the onchain lending market scales rapidly: Aave's V4 reached a record $100 in deposits within days of launch, while Morpho is generating about $17.65 million in monthly fees, or more than $205 million on an annualized basis.

Aave's next-generation DeFi lending architecture, V4, has surpassed $900 million in deposits and is approaching the $1 billion mark, less than six months after its mainnet debut in March. The $900 million figure is Aave's own count of total assets supplied, while independent trackers like DeFiLlama show a lower ~$399 million due to methodology differences. V4 replaces V3's siloed pools with a Hub-and-Spoke design, allowing specialized markets to share deep liquidity while isolating risk. Deposits have grown roughly 131% in the past 30 days, with active loans recently topping $250 million for the first time, driven by new markets such as an EtherFi Cash instance on Optimism and an Ethena market launched September 7th. Even near $1 billion, V4 remains a small fraction of Aave's roughly $30 billion supplied across V3 and over 20 chains, indicating early traction rather than a shift in dominance.

Coinbase-issued tokenized stocks went live on Base on Monday, starting with fractional shares of Apple and Nvidia. Every eligible user outside the United States can now hold a claim on real equity in a self-custody wallet, trade it on Aerodrome, or post it as collateral on Aave, with AERO climbing more than 13% on the day. Each token corresponds to a share held by Alpaca, a regulated broker and custodian, and the holder has a direct claim on that share rather than exposure to a derivative tracking its price. Coinbase built it on a token standard called B20, which handles dividends and stock splits without changing token balances, so an open lending position or liquidity pool doesn't break when Apple pays out. This is the second time in a week a US company has shipped a product that Americans can't touch, following Coinbase's addition of perpetual futures to its Base App through Hyperliquid on Wednesday, excluding US, UK, and Canadian users, while Robinhood launched its own layer-2 chain last month with tokenized stocks among the first offerings, available in over 120 countries but not at home.

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at crypto asset manager Bitwise, said in a blog post on August 12 that crypto valuations could at least double. According to Hougan, crypto assets beyond bitcoin are becoming a revenue-driven market, with network activity increasingly reflected in the value of native tokens. He noted that investors have not yet priced in this shift, and some crypto assets are undervalued. He cited Hyperliquid, Uniswap, Aave, Pump.fun, and Lighter as protocols that buy back tokens with fees or remove them from circulation. For example, Hyperliquid used about 99 percent of its roughly 800 million dollars in revenue last year to buy back and burn its native token HYPE, and has burned a cumulative 1.3 billion dollars worth. Hougan expects decentralized finance applications and other layer-1 networks to adopt similar revenue-generation mechanisms over the next 12 to 24 months. However, he cautioned that token holders do not have legal claims to cash flows like shareholders, and tokenomics can change. If the link between revenue and price becomes established, crypto assets could be valued using metrics closer to equities, further expanding room for institutional participation.

At major DeFi lending platform Aave, borrowings of the stablecoin USDT jumped by roughly 239 million USDT, or about 39 billion yen, in one week, reaching approximately 400 billion yen. The USDT borrow balance in Aave V3 Core expanded from around 2.218 billion USDT on July 13 to about 2.457 billion USDT on July 20, hitting 95.5 percent of the borrow cap of 2.574 billion USDT that had just been raised on July 15. In response to this surge, risk management contributor LlamaRisk proposed on July 21 to further increase the borrow cap by 516 million USDT to 3.09 billion USDT. Behind the trend is the growth of trades that borrow USDT using Ethena's synthetic dollar USDe as collateral. The supply cap for USDe also reached 99.4 percent shortly after its increase on July 15, prompting another raise to 902 million USDe.

Crypto exchange Kraken is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in decentralized finance protocol Aave at a $385 million U.S. valuation. The privately held exchange would invest 35,000 Ethereum in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens and a 15% equity stake, a deal worth $71 million U.S. This would be the first in a series of deals aimed at expanding Kraken ahead of an upcoming initial public offering. Aave is the largest decentralized lender, enabling users to lend and borrow crypto assets without intermediaries. Kraken has recently increased acquisitions, agreeing in April to buy crypto derivatives platform Bitnomial for $550 million U.S., as it builds a multi-asset platform ahead of a potential IPO in the second half of this year.