Near co-founder says liquidity remains the biggest challenge for tokenized stocks

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the network wants to connect tokenized equities directly with liquidity from traditional markets, positioning NEAR Intents as an aggregation layer between crypto and venues such as Nasdaq.

Speaking with Ashton Addison on the Crypto Coin Show, Polosukhin said liquidity remains one of the biggest limitations facing tokenized equities as more stocks and funds move onchain.

“There’s a little bit on Solana, there’s a little bit on Ethereum, there’s a little bit on Base,” Polosukhin said, arguing that liquidity has become increasingly fragmented across networks and platforms.

The problem becomes more apparent for larger trades. Polosukhin used Nvidia as an example, saying that purchasing $10 million worth of the stock is relatively straightforward through Nasdaq, but executing an equivalent tokenized trade onchain remains difficult because available markets are much thinner.

NEAR is trying to address that gap through NEAR Intents, which allows users to specify the asset and amount they want rather than manually navigating individual chains, bridges and liquidity pools.

Under the model described by Polosukhin, a user seeking $10 million of tokenized Nvidia could submit an intent, while a solver could source or mint the corresponding assets through Ondo as part of the transaction.

“This now allows anyone to come in and actually tap into liquidity of Nasdaq onchain,” Polosukhin said, adding that NEAR Intents could aggregate liquidity from onchain markets, centralized exchanges and traditional financial venues rather than relying on liquidity native to a single blockchain.

The comments follow the integration of Ondo Stocks with near.com and NEAR Intents in September. The rollout initially brought 20 tokenized US stocks, ETFs and commodity linked products to the platform, including Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Ondo said its tokenized securities platform had surpassed $1 billion in total value locked and $26 billion in cumulative trading volume at the time of the integration.

Ondo Stocks are also available across Ethereum, Solana and BNB Chain, illustrating the growing number of networks competing for tokenized equity activity. NEAR Intents takes a different approach by attempting to route demand across those markets rather than requiring liquidity to concentrate on one chain.

Polosukhin said this aggregation model could become increasingly important as more real world assets move onchain.

“NEAR Intents become an aggregator not just of onchain centralized exchanges, but now Nasdaq and other liquidity that is trading these RWAs,” he said. “We are unifying liquidity across all of the venues.”