Crypto Industry Confronts Liquidity, Stablecoin UX Gaps — SkimNews
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- Cointelegraph hosted its CONNECT event with four panels and a startup pitch competition covering tokenization, stablecoin payments, onchain trading infrastructure and crypto VC exits.
- Alex Taaffe and DWF Labs partner Lingling Jiang said liquidity fragmentation is the core tokenization problem, with supply of tokenized RWAs outpacing demand and different issuers creating separate pools for the same underlying assets.
- Ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze and Mercuryo CCO Ashna Vaghela said stablecoin adoption is blocked by everyday-usability gaps, with Vaghela citing Apple Pay as the UX benchmark and Silagadze noting Singapore users hold USDC but still need local currency to pay bills.
- Stablecoin market capitalization stood at $306 billion at the time of the discussion, up roughly 2% year-over-year after approximately 74% growth in the prior 12 months, per DefiLlama data cited in the article.
- DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa said onchain liquidity fragmentation is both an execution problem and a data problem, making it difficult to determine how much liquidity truly exists across networks.
- Arkham Intelligence CEO Miguel Morel said exchanges can use onchain data to screen deposit origins and counterparty risk in prediction markets without requiring passports, allowing tighter spreads and compliance triage.
- Nomad Capital's Pulkit Gupta said altcoin liquidity has been weak over the past three months, complicating VC exits, while OneAsset CEO Sonia Shaw said the market has matured and six-month exits are no longer realistic.
Why it matters: With $306 billion in stablecoin market cap and asset managers flooding into tokenization, fragmented liquidity across competing pools of the same underlying assets is driving up execution costs onchain, and the inability to spend stablecoins like everyday money is keeping the market from reaching mainstream users — both gating problems panelists said must be solved before crypto's next growth phase.
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