NEAR’s Tokenized Stock Push Faces a Test Over Fragmented Liquidity

Liquidity for tokenized stocks remains spread across blockchains and traditional trading venues, creating a challenge for large orders as NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin described a proposed way to route trades across available sources.

In an Oct. 1 interview, Polosukhin used a hypothetical $10 million Nvidia purchase to compare a trade through Nasdaq with finding enough onchain liquidity for an equivalent order. The example was illustrative and was not a reported NEAR Intents transaction.

NEAR Intents lets users specify an asset and amount, then routes the request among available liquidity sources. Polosukhin described its aim as bringing liquidity from different venues together.

The discussion follows Ondo Finance’s Sept. 22 launch of Ondo Stocks on near.com and NEAR Intents. The integration started with 20 tokenized U.S. stocks, exchange-traded funds and commodity-linked products.

At launch, Ondo’s broader platform had more than $1 billion in total value locked and more than $26 billion in cumulative trading volume. Those figures cover Ondo’s platform overall; they do not measure activity or accessible liquidity through NEAR Intents.

Tokenized stocks are blockchain-based products tied to stock exposure. Their availability through NEAR’s interface gives users access to those products, while Polosukhin’s example highlights the open question of how much liquidity is reachable for a large trade.