Crypto
You Can Tokenize It. Can You Sell It? What a GSR Executive Said, and What Platforms Should Check.
A GSR executive told Cointelegraph’s CONNECT in Singapore that demand for fully tokenized real-world assets has not kept pace with supply, and liquidity is split across issuers and chains. Here is what treasury teams and platforms should check before committing capital.
Roland Cinco 4 min read
Signal Spotlight · Tokenized assets and liquidity
What happened
According to Cointelegraph's recap, as relayed by TradingView and Cryptobreaking, CONNECT Singapore Edition ran four panels on 9 October. On tokenization, Alex Taaffe, chief revenue officer at GSR, said liquidity is improving for pre-IPO stocks, commodities and global equities. He also said issuers' push to bring capital formation onchain has outpaced investor appetite for fully tokenized real-world assets, creating a supply and demand imbalance. "There's a ton of supply," he said.
Taaffe said more issuers and blockchains have fragmented liquidity. Lingling Jiang, a partner at DWF Labs, made the same point, saying that when different issuers tokenize the same asset, each creates a separate liquidity pool.
A separate panel on investor exits had Pulkit Gupta of Nomad Capital saying liquidity has been particularly weak over the past three months, with trading concentrated in larger cryptocurrencies. Sonia Shaw, CEO of OneAsset, said investors no longer expect exits within six months.
The recap also covered stablecoins. It cites DefiLlama figures showing a stablecoin market cap of about $306 billion, up about 2% year over year after growing roughly 74% in the prior 12 months. Speakers said everyday spending and user experience matter for wider use, and that providers must adapt to rules that differ by jurisdiction.
What the coverage does and does not say
The point is about demand and fragmentation. The reporting says supply has outrun demand and that liquidity is split across issuers and chains. It does not say that regulatory access or product availability has stopped being a barrier.
No exit-cost figures are given. We found no numbers for spreads, depth or price impact when selling a tokenized position. We cannot say how much it would cost to exit a given size.
Liquidity is described as improving in some areas. Taaffe named pre-IPO stocks, commodities and global equities. The weakness he described is in fully tokenized real-world assets generally.
The speakers have commercial interests. GSR provides market-making and liquidity services. Crypto Briefing reports GSR is investing more than $100 million in onchain finance and tokenization products. That does not make the point wrong, but it is context for a liquidity provider describing a liquidity problem. This is our observation, not a claim made in the recap.
Crypto Briefing reports a similar view from GSR's CEO. It cites Xin Song saying that wrapping a security in a token is easy and finding a buyer is not, from remarks made in March. It also quotes market estimates of $39 billion to $60 billion for tokenized real-world assets, with many recording no trades in a given week. We did not verify those estimates.
Why it matters
The signal is where the risk sits in a tokenization plan. Issuing and custody are the visible steps. The harder one is selling, and the panel's own examples, from fragmented pools to weak altcoin exits, all point to depth as a thing to test.
For Philippine treasury teams and operators looking at tokenized instruments or stablecoin settlement, the practical reading is to treat exit depth as a question for the vendor before committing capital. That is our reading. The coverage is about Singapore, global markets and crypto generally, and we found nothing specific to Philippine firms or to Philippine rules.
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