Near co-founder says liquidity remains the biggest challenge for tokenized stocks
NEAR Protocol is addressing the critical issue of liquidity fragmentation in the tokenized equity market through its NEAR Intents architecture. Co-founder Illia Polosukhin highlighted that while assets like Nvidia stock are moving onchain, liquidity remains siloed across various networks such as Ethereum, Solana, and Base. NEAR Intents functions as an aggregation layer, allowing users to execute large trades by specifying desired assets rather than manually navigating bridges or individual liquidity pools. By integrating with Ondo Finance, which recently surpassed $1 billion in total value locked, NEAR aims to bridge the gap between onchain tokenized securities and traditional financial venues like Nasdaq. This model enables solvers to source or mint assets across multiple chains and centralized exchanges to fulfill user orders efficiently. The platform currently supports 20 tokenized US stocks and ETFs, including major equities like Tesla and Apple. This development is significant for the RWA market as it provides a unified infrastructure to scale institutional-grade trading volumes across disparate blockchain ecosystems.