BaseLayer - Ep 1: Alexander Cutler (Core-contributor, Aerodrome)

Hey, I'm Alex Cutler. I am from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I'm a core contributor at Aerad Drrome. For a lot of my life, I loved playing games. Uh, I was a huge sports fan, but now, uh, crypto, this sort of onchain world feels like a game, so I don't game much anymore. Um, feels like a sport, so I don't pay attention to sports.

This is the bleeding edge of technology. [music] So, it's hard to pay attention to pretty much anything else. I think in my early life, I was primarily shaped by kind of two different areas, which was the political world and the technology world. In Minnesota, there was a United States senator, his name was uh Paul Wellstone. He was one of the only individuals to vote against the Iraq war when that broke out.

and that sort of courage of conviction um that sort of willingness to put it all on the line even when everything was sort of going against him and he was a major inspiration for me. The first thing I built was a political organization that was designed to basically galvanize all the young people to [music] vote in the the 2006 election. It's interesting cuz I would describe myself as an accidental builder. It was 2020 [music] in the pandemic and I started by building a gaming PC. Then I was like, "Hey, uh, I should try mining some Bitcoin with this, right?"

So, I start mining some Bitcoin. And for anybody who's done that, right, it's kind of a magic moment where in a way it feels like you're just producing value [music] from nothing. And then you have these coins and you kind of go, "Okay, what am I going to go do with these?" move them on to Coinbase and you start swapping for other types of coins. That was just like Alice in Wonderland.

I quit my job just knowing I needed to [music] go as deep down this hole as I possibly could. Aerrome is as fundamentally [music] an exchange for this new onchain economy. The story is a story that is like only possible in this onchain world, right? It was a handful of guys who only knew each other by pseudonyms and PFPs, you know, meeting in a community [music] in Discord. And what we saw was there was an opportunity that [music] the existing exchange models out there had things missing.

And we just believed that if we built this sort of exchange that combined all the best of [music] the previous exchanges out there and built uh according to the right principles that we could be one of the largest in the world. I think one of the hardest moments was we launched directly into one of the biggest collapses of the cycle, the Luna collapse. There was just complete fear, panic, cynicism. [music] So it looked like it was not going to work out. You had to be a bit nuts to believe and the only thing I can say about it is it's just this perseverance is the most [music] important attribute in being a founder in being a builder.

Air drone chose to build on base [music] because we believed they were going to take over the world. This is one of the best consumer crypto product companies putting their full weight behind the chain and we knew we had something very special in this new exchange model and we wanted to be a part of that. After our launch, we doubled the TVL of Bass in about 48 hours and we've [music] remained one of the largest protocols on base ever since. [music] Brian Armstrong has liked to say that Coinbase's belief [music] is that in the next 5 years 10% of global GDP will come on chain. So where I see Aerome going [music] is basically being the exchange infrastructure of this new onchain economy and because it is fundamentally infrastructure a lot of people will be using Aerome without even knowing they're using it.

I think this is the place to be building. This feels like a revolution similar to so many of the revolutions we've seen in early computing and mobile and in web 2. And so you're in the right place. The second thing I would say is [music] think about the first principles right out of the gate. Think about the things that you [music] will not compromise on.

Think about what doing it the right way means to you [music] and then never compromise on them. I'm Alex. I'm a core contributor at Aerodrome and I am building on base.