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Why capital mobility will define the future of onchain markets
Alex Tsepaev, chief strategy officer at B2PRIME Group, discusses the importance of free capital movement to growing digital asset markets, issues the industry is facing, and what needs to be done to find a common language and shared standards
Image: B2PRIME Group
Tokenisation has managed the tradability issue that digital markets had. Real assets — bonds, loans, commodities, and real estate — are all now regularly issued and settled onchain, which has greatly eased how they are traded.
As a result, the tokenised real-world asset (RWA) market is approaching US$30 billion, according to Chainalysis. And such rapid growth has become the answer to the main question facing digital markets: can traditional assets exist on the blockchain? As we see, they can — and at scale.
But tokenisation, despite easing exchange, has created another issue that the industry has yet to address. Can capital, once onchain, really move where needed, when needed, and without friction?
In most cases, for now, the answer could be that it is not that easy. This is not a liquidity problem in the usual sense, but a mobility one. Capital exists, but it is locked behind fragmented platforms or collateral mechanisms that were not created for the onchain world.
Liquidity is no longer the main limitation
For years, the belief has been that more platforms and faster settlement will become a universal pill in digital asset markets. Add another exchange, tokenise more assets, and the liquidity will catch up on its own.
But over time, the market reached an inflexion point where it realised that liquidity has ceased to be the main issue. Take, for example, the latest J.P. Morgan Markets Survey, which recorded a change in the priorities of institutional traders. According to the survey, access to liquidity has indeed been the main problem of the market structure for 10 years. But for the first time, it gave way to the development of market technologies — 22 per cent versus 21 per cent of votes, respectively.
To be clear, this does not mean that liquidity has stopped worrying market participants at all. Instead, the result illustrates that it is no longer being perceived as an independent problem. Institutions now point out that the real bottleneck is in the infrastructure that has to move this capital between sites and functions. That said, the real challenge for onchain markets lies in building infrastructure allowing capital to continuously flow, not liquidity itself.
Institutional challenges
To fix capital movement, digital capital markets require not necessarily new trading platforms or faster calculations, but rather the solution to three institutional challenges long familiar to traditional markets.
The first is trying to ensure the efficient movement of capital through fragmented liquidity environments. The truth is, the fragmentation we are all trying to battle is not a side effect of the early stage of the market; it is a structural feature. Look at how the market is built: assets tokenised on different networks, from different providers, and under different requirements. There is no universal standard, and it is hard to imagine creating one. So without it, capital gets stuck in silos.
Another challenge is collateral mobility. In traditional markets, it is often tied up until a transaction settles, limiting its use elsewhere. The good news is that blockchain-based repo markets are changing that. Similar to TradFi repo principles, institutions can exchange tokenised collateral within minutes, allowing liquidity to be borrowed or released exactly when it is needed. As a result, trading desks have more flexibility to manage short-term funding needs. This way, capital can be reused more frequently, improving overall efficiency. This is one reason why 40 per cent of respondents in the same J.P. Morgan survey said tokenisation is the biggest opportunity for 2026, as the technology is making capital itself more productive.
And last but not least, risk management also remains one of the biggest gaps in digital markets. Traditional finance has shown that institutional investors do not rely on a market simply because transactions settle quickly. The real trust begins when they can monitor exposures and control risk continuously, especially given the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.
Digital asset markets, so far, have not reached the same level of maturity, which is normal for a relatively new industry. Although they have made significant progress in trading, it is still managed across separate systems. As a result, firms lack a unified view of their positions and risk in real time, so the capital mobility issue persists.
Solving the capital movement problem
As mentioned before, increasing the speed of trade or introducing new platforms alone does not fix anything. If there is no common language between the platforms, capital cannot introduce itself, confirm its origin, or the right to move.
That is why the first thing the industry should do is to agree on a standard for metadata and asset rights. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Euroclear, and Clearstream have already warned us about it.
In their recent papers, financial market infrastructures (FMIs) say that without reliable interoperability between blockchains and traditional infrastructure, tokenised securities will not be able to scale and institutions will face higher costs and fragmented capital. The firms also describe the future not as the victory of a single dominant network, but as a network of networks.
Another solution is that interoperability should also work at the level of settlement finality. In a recent publication, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) framed this almost explicitly as a legal issue: the market needs to know for sure whether the completion of settlement on a ledger is legally recognised as final. Otherwise, tokenised markets risk remaining fragmented. The authors propose a two-layer solution that could work. In this model, smart contracts define operational rules, while traditional legal agreements establish rights, obligations, and dispute resolution procedures.
In any case, none of the challenges described above will be solved by the tokenised asset market growing.
A market of US$30 billion will not become a market of US$300 billion simply because the volumes increase. It will develop only when the capital within it begins to move as freely as data.
As a result, the tokenised real-world asset (RWA) market is approaching US$30 billion, according to Chainalysis. And such rapid growth has become the answer to the main question facing digital markets: can traditional assets exist on the blockchain? As we see, they can — and at scale.
But tokenisation, despite easing exchange, has created another issue that the industry has yet to address. Can capital, once onchain, really move where needed, when needed, and without friction?
In most cases, for now, the answer could be that it is not that easy. This is not a liquidity problem in the usual sense, but a mobility one. Capital exists, but it is locked behind fragmented platforms or collateral mechanisms that were not created for the onchain world.
Liquidity is no longer the main limitation
For years, the belief has been that more platforms and faster settlement will become a universal pill in digital asset markets. Add another exchange, tokenise more assets, and the liquidity will catch up on its own.
But over time, the market reached an inflexion point where it realised that liquidity has ceased to be the main issue. Take, for example, the latest J.P. Morgan Markets Survey, which recorded a change in the priorities of institutional traders. According to the survey, access to liquidity has indeed been the main problem of the market structure for 10 years. But for the first time, it gave way to the development of market technologies — 22 per cent versus 21 per cent of votes, respectively.
To be clear, this does not mean that liquidity has stopped worrying market participants at all. Instead, the result illustrates that it is no longer being perceived as an independent problem. Institutions now point out that the real bottleneck is in the infrastructure that has to move this capital between sites and functions. That said, the real challenge for onchain markets lies in building infrastructure allowing capital to continuously flow, not liquidity itself.
Institutional challenges
To fix capital movement, digital capital markets require not necessarily new trading platforms or faster calculations, but rather the solution to three institutional challenges long familiar to traditional markets.
The first is trying to ensure the efficient movement of capital through fragmented liquidity environments. The truth is, the fragmentation we are all trying to battle is not a side effect of the early stage of the market; it is a structural feature. Look at how the market is built: assets tokenised on different networks, from different providers, and under different requirements. There is no universal standard, and it is hard to imagine creating one. So without it, capital gets stuck in silos.
Another challenge is collateral mobility. In traditional markets, it is often tied up until a transaction settles, limiting its use elsewhere. The good news is that blockchain-based repo markets are changing that. Similar to TradFi repo principles, institutions can exchange tokenised collateral within minutes, allowing liquidity to be borrowed or released exactly when it is needed. As a result, trading desks have more flexibility to manage short-term funding needs. This way, capital can be reused more frequently, improving overall efficiency. This is one reason why 40 per cent of respondents in the same J.P. Morgan survey said tokenisation is the biggest opportunity for 2026, as the technology is making capital itself more productive.
And last but not least, risk management also remains one of the biggest gaps in digital markets. Traditional finance has shown that institutional investors do not rely on a market simply because transactions settle quickly. The real trust begins when they can monitor exposures and control risk continuously, especially given the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.
Digital asset markets, so far, have not reached the same level of maturity, which is normal for a relatively new industry. Although they have made significant progress in trading, it is still managed across separate systems. As a result, firms lack a unified view of their positions and risk in real time, so the capital mobility issue persists.
Solving the capital movement problem
As mentioned before, increasing the speed of trade or introducing new platforms alone does not fix anything. If there is no common language between the platforms, capital cannot introduce itself, confirm its origin, or the right to move.
That is why the first thing the industry should do is to agree on a standard for metadata and asset rights. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Euroclear, and Clearstream have already warned us about it.
In their recent papers, financial market infrastructures (FMIs) say that without reliable interoperability between blockchains and traditional infrastructure, tokenised securities will not be able to scale and institutions will face higher costs and fragmented capital. The firms also describe the future not as the victory of a single dominant network, but as a network of networks.
Another solution is that interoperability should also work at the level of settlement finality. In a recent publication, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) framed this almost explicitly as a legal issue: the market needs to know for sure whether the completion of settlement on a ledger is legally recognised as final. Otherwise, tokenised markets risk remaining fragmented. The authors propose a two-layer solution that could work. In this model, smart contracts define operational rules, while traditional legal agreements establish rights, obligations, and dispute resolution procedures.
In any case, none of the challenges described above will be solved by the tokenised asset market growing.
A market of US$30 billion will not become a market of US$300 billion simply because the volumes increase. It will develop only when the capital within it begins to move as freely as data.
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