Today we're opening the public testnet of AevaChain, a Layer 1 where ownership is the primitive. Hold test stocks that pay dividends every hour. Sell the dividends and keep the shares. Borrow against them without giving them up. Settle any trade in a single block. And tomorrow, $AEVA launches on Robinhood Chain.
This post covers everything: what you can do today, why Aeva exists, how it works under the hood, what makes it different, and what comes next.
AevaChain testnet, live figures from the first days of operation.
Start here
Try it in five minutes
Open the app: aevachain.app
Connect MetaMask (it adds the network for you) or Keplr
Get test funds from the faucet (faucet.aevachain.com): test AEVA for fees, test aeUSD, and shares of a test stock
Watch your first dividend arrive within the hour, then sell it, borrow against your shares, or trade
Links
App: aevachain.app
Explorer: explorer.aevachain.com
Faucet: faucet.aevachain.com
Docs: docs.aevachain.com
Node releases (signed): releases.aevachain.com
Website: aevachain.com
Network: chain ID aeva-testnet-1 · EVM chain ID 2382 · RPC https://evm.aevachain.com · gas token test AEVA
Everything on the testnet is test value: test AEVA, test aeUSD and test assets have no monetary value. Test AEVA is the testnet's gas token and is not the $AEVA token.
What you can do today
Hold test stocks that pay dividends. Test versions of large US equities, plus a test Treasury note, each paying a test dividend in aeUSD every hour, directly to every holder.
Sell the dividends, keep the shares. A share's income right trades on its own. Sell the next dividends for cash today; keep ownership and the vote.
Borrow against your shares. Pledge shares and receive aeUSD in seconds. The shares never leave your wallet; the chain adds a lock.
Settle directly with anyone. Propose a trade to any address. Both sides move in one block, or neither does.
Swap and provide liquidity on the native DEX, including pairs against AEVA.
Launch your own asset in a few clicks: a community token, a dividend-paying share, an equity-style asset or a bond.
Claim, route and delegate income, complete on-chain quests, and watch everything live on the explorer.
Build: deploy Solidity contracts with your usual tools, or run a node from the signed releases (a fresh machine syncs in under a minute).
Why Aeva exists
Tokenization has a quiet problem. When a share, bond or fund unit goes on a blockchain today, what usually arrives is a number in a smart contract. The contract knows a balance. It does not know that the balance carries a dividend, that part of it is pledged, that it votes, or that only certain investors may hold it. All of that stays off-chain: in registries, transfer agents, payout scripts and collateral agreements that have to be reconciled by hand.
Left: the token moves on-chain, the ownership stays off-chain. Right: on Aeva, the rights, rules, income, locks and settlement are part of the protocol, and checked every block.
That gap is why tokenized assets rarely do more than move. They don't split, they don't pay natively, they can't be pledged without handing them to a contract, and every integration rebuilds the same logic again. Aeva closes it by making ownership itself the thing the chain understands.
What makes Aeva different
A financial asset is not one thing. A share is a bundle of claims: economic ownership, the right to dividends, the right to vote. In traditional finance these claims are routinely separated: coupons are stripped from bonds, dividends are sold forward, shares are pledged while their owner keeps the vote. On Aeva, each of those claims is a native object the protocol can hold, move, lock and pay.
One test share on Aeva: three rights, each with its own price and its own market. Prices are examples.
That one design choice is what the rest of the system builds on: income that pays itself, collateral without custody, settlement that can't half-happen, and rules that no contract can bypass.
Where Aeva sits among networks built for real-world assets.
How it works
The architecture
AevaChain is a sovereign proof-of-stake Layer 1 built on the Cosmos SDK with CometBFT consensus. Blocks arrive about every 1.3 seconds and are final the moment they're committed: no probabilistic confirmations and no reorganisations. The state machine is made of purpose-built modules for assets, rights, policies, credentials, settlement, encumbrances, payouts and waterfalls. An EVM runs alongside them, so MetaMask and Solidity work as usual, but it's a window onto the native asset model, not where assets live.
The AevaChain stack: consensus, native modules, invariants in every block, native and EVM interfaces, independent reconciliation, and the bridge to Robinhood Chain.
Assets, rights and positions
Every asset has a root record (issuer, roles, status, holder policy, the hash of its legal documents) and a set of right kinds beneath it, each with its own supply and class. Holdings are positions: for an asset, a kind and a holder, a number of units and how many of them are locked. There's no separate token balance to keep in sync; the position is the ownership record. A bundle lets the kinds of one share move together, and because each kind is its own object, the bundle can be taken apart and put back together.
Rules enforced by consensus
Each asset carries a policy written in a small, closed grammar: open to anyone, holders with a credential from named attesters, an allowlist, a maximum number of holders, or combinations of these. The chain evaluates the policy on the state that would result from every transfer, whether it arrives as a native message, a settlement, a liquidation or an EVM call. A denied transfer names the exact rule that failed. Credentials are attestations, not identity documents: no personal data is ever stored on-chain.
Income that pays itself
Dividends and coupons are paid into the protocol once and accrue to every holder at the same moment, without looping over holders or sending thousands of transfers. The chain keeps one number per income right: the income per unit paid so far. A holder's claim is their units times the growth of that number since they started holding. It costs the same with ten holders or ten million.
Pull-based accrual: one update per payout, exact claims for every holder, and income that follows the right wherever it goes.
Collateral without custody
Pledges, liens, lockups, escrow and income delegation all use one primitive: a lock on units inside the holder's own position. Your shares never move into a lending contract. The lender gets a claim on the locked units; while the loan runs, the dividends can be routed to them; repaying releases the lock in the same transaction; and if the loan must be liquidated, the units move through the normal, policy-checked transfer path.
Borrowing on Aeva: the shares stay yours, only a lock is added.
Settlement that can't half-happen
Delivery versus payment is native. The proposer's side is escrowed by the chain; when the counterparty accepts, their side is checked and both legs execute together in one block. If the offer expires, the escrow returns automatically. Nobody depends on anybody else's cooperation to get their assets back.
Delivery versus payment in one block.
A ledger that checks itself
At the end of every block, every validator verifies the accounting invariants: no right has more units in positions than its supply, no position is locked beyond its balance, every lock matches its encumbrance, payout and pool balances match what was paid in and out, and bridge escrow matches what crossed. If any check fails, the chain halts rather than produce another block on inconsistent accounting.
Alongside the chain, an independent indexer rebuilds the entire ledger from the chain's events and reconciles it with the chain at every block. Any difference, called drift, is shown publicly on every explorer page. Since genesis, drift has been zero.
The EVM, as a facade
Aeva runs an EVM so that wallets, Solidity and existing tools just work. Every right kind is exposed to contracts as an AE-20 token at a fixed address, implemented as a precompile that calls the native transfer path, policies included. Contracts can hold and move rights, and trade them on the DEX, but they can't mint them or bypass their rules.
$AEVA
$AEVA launches tomorrow, 25 September, on Robinhood Chain mainnet.
Contract address: (published at launch on @AevaChain on X) Only trust the address from our official channels.
$AEVA is the native token of AevaChain. It pays for every transaction on the network, native and EVM alike; it's staked by validators to secure the chain; and it governs upgrades, parameters and bridge routes. One rule is written into the design: any future way of paying fees in a stablecoin must convert into $AEVA at the fee layer, never bypass it.
$AEVA launches first on Robinhood Chain. When AevaChain mainnet goes live, native $AEVA becomes canonical at genesis, and holders on Robinhood Chain can move to native $AEVA and back through the bridge. No bridge can ever mint the token that secures the chain: bridged $AEVA is always backed by $AEVA locked on AevaChain.
Real assets generate on-chain activity every day. Every one of those actions runs on $AEVA.
The testnet's gas token (test AEVA, from the faucet) is not $AEVA and has no value.
Robinhood Chain integration
Aeva is built to connect with Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum Layer 2 designed for tokenized assets. A cross-chain bridge based on Hyperlane is already built and tested: it carries $AEVA and stablecoin liquidity between the two networks and can take individual rights out to Robinhood Chain and back. Its deployment to Robinhood Chain's testnet is in progress. The goal is simple: assets and liquidity from Robinhood Chain can use Aeva's native rights, income, collateral and settlement, and return whenever their holders want.
Aeva is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Robinhood.
Ownership is the primitive
Other networks put assets on a blockchain. Aeva makes ownership the blockchain. Try it at aevachain.app, look under the hood at explorer.aevachain.com, and build with us at docs.aevachain.com.
Testnet assets are test tokens without value. They are not securities, are not backed by or affiliated with any company whose name they reference, and are not offered to anyone. This post describes the design of the $AEVA token; it is not an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any token, and nothing in it is investment advice.
