Crypto execs flag liquidity fragmentation at CONNECT — SkimNews
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- Alex Taaffe said tokenized real-world assets face a supply-demand imbalance, with growing numbers of asset issuers and blockchains fragmenting liquidity into separate pools that hinder onchain capital formation.
- Lingling Jiang of DWF Labs agreed fragmentation is the core challenge — especially when multiple issuers tokenize the same underlying asset into competing pools — though she noted crypto liquidity has improved significantly in recent years.
- Mike Silagadze of ether.fi said stablecoins have not broken into everyday spending: consumers in Singapore may hold USDC but still need local currency to pay bills, making day-to-day financial integration the missing layer for adoption.
- Stablecoin market capitalization stood at $306 billion, up roughly 2% year over year after growing about 74% in the preceding 12 months, as discussed during the payments panel.
- Austin Federa of DoubleZero called onchain liquidity fragmentation "a data problem" — noting it is difficult to determine how much liquidity truly exists across networks — while Miguel Morel of Arkham Intelligence said onchain analytics let exchanges assess counterparty risk and deposit origins without requesting a passport.
- Pulkit Gupta of Nomad Capital said crypto market liquidity has been weak over the past three months and concentrated in larger tokens, making altcoin exits "really tough" for VC backers of projects including Movement, Solayer and Berachain.
Why it matters: Across every CONNECT panel — RWAs, stablecoins, onchain trading, and VC exits — leaders converged on fragmented liquidity as the binding constraint, even as the stablecoin market nearly doubled to $306B over the prior 12 months. For asset issuers, stablecoin payment providers and crypto VCs, the implication is direct: growth in tokenized products, everyday stablecoin use and altcoin exits all depend on solving a cross-chain liquidity problem that current infrastructure cannot yet aggregate.
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