Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of the NEAR blockchain, says fragmented liquidity is still the biggest problem facing tokenized stocks. He made the comment as NEAR Intents, a project on the network, works to connect onchain markets directly with Nasdaq liquidity.
The idea is straightforward: tokenized versions of public equities already exist on several chains, but trading them is clumsy. Prices drift from the real thing, spreads are wide, and there's rarely enough volume to fill a serious order. Polosukhin's proposed fix is to let onchain venues tap into Nasdaq's order book rather than trying to build a parallel market from scratch.
Why liquidity keeps splitting
Tokenized stocks have been around for years, but they've never consolidated. Each platform tends to issue its own wrapped version of a share, and those tokens can't be swapped freely across venues. The result is a patchwork of small pools, each with its own price.
That fragmentation creates a practical problem. If a token trades on one chain at a slight premium and on another at a discount, arbitrageurs should in theory close the gap. In practice, the gaps persist because moving assets between chains is slow and expensive, and because there's no single venue with enough depth to set a reference price.
Polosukhin's argument is that the problem isn't demand. It's plumbing. Investors who want exposure to tokenized equities are being asked to accept worse execution than they'd get from a conventional broker, and that keeps the market small.
NEAR Intents and the Nasdaq connection
NEAR Intents is the vehicle for this push. The project is designed to route trades across different chains and liquidity sources, and the specific goal here is to link onchain markets to Nasdaq liquidity.
That's a meaningful distinction from the way most tokenized stock platforms operate today. Rather than issuing a synthetic token and hoping a market develops around it, the approach would let onchain trades interact with an existing, deep pool of orders. Nasdaq is one of the world's largest equities venues, and its order book carries the kind of volume that tokenized markets have never generated on their own.
How that connection would work in practice — whether through a data feed, a settlement layer, or some form of tokenized representation — isn't spelled out in the current plan. The regulatory questions are equally unresolved. Nasdaq is a US-regulated exchange, and linking it to onchain trading venues would raise custody, reporting, and market-access issues that no one has yet answered publicly.
The execution gap
For now, the tokenized stock market remains a niche. Trading volumes are thin compared with the underlying equities, and the tokens often trade at prices that don't match the shares they're supposed to represent.
Polosukhin's framing puts the blame on market structure rather than on investor appetite. If liquidity is fragmented across dozens of chains and protocols, no single venue can offer competitive pricing. Connecting to an established order book would, in theory, give onchain traders a single source of truth for price and depth.
Whether that's technically feasible without compromising the permissionless nature of onchain markets is an open question. Nasdaq's order book isn't public infrastructure, and access to it is controlled by brokers and market makers who operate under strict rules.
What comes next
NEAR Intents hasn't published a timeline for the Nasdaq integration, and there's no indication yet that Nasdaq itself is involved in the effort. The project's stated aim is to connect onchain markets with Nasdaq liquidity, but the mechanics of that connection — and the regulatory path — remain undefined.
For tokenized stocks to become more than a curiosity, someone has to solve the fragmentation problem. Polosukhin is betting that the answer is to plug into the existing market rather than rebuild it. The next few months will show whether that's a workable plan or just a direction of travel.
