$NEAR Intents Aims to Solve Liquidity Challenge for Tokenized Stocks

$NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has highlighted liquidity as the biggest hurdle for tokenized stocks, despite growing interest in bringing traditional equities onchain. Speaking on the Crypto Coin Show, Polosukhin explained that liquidity for tokenized stocks is currently scattered across different blockchains like Solana, Ethereum, and Base, making large trades difficult to execute.

Polosukhin used Nvidia as an example, noting that purchasing $10 million worth of tokenized Nvidia stock remains challenging due to thin markets. To address this, $NEAR is developing $NEAR Intents, a system that allows users to specify their desired asset and amount without manually navigating multiple chains, bridges, and liquidity pools.

Under this model, a user seeking $10 million of tokenized Nvidia could submit an intent, while a solver could source or mint the assets through Ondo as part of the transaction. Polosukhin emphasized that $NEAR Intents could aggregate liquidity from onchain markets, centralized exchanges, and traditional financial venues like Nasdaq, rather than relying solely on a single blockchain.

These comments follow the integration of Ondo Stocks with near.com and $NEAR Intents in September, which initially brought 20 tokenized US stocks, ETFs, and commodity-linked products to the platform. Ondo reported that 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.