The maturation of DeFi technology has created a paradox: while battle-tested codebases and rising technical proficiency have lowered the barrier to entry for launching new protocols, securing sustainable liquidity has never been harder. As thousands of projects built on increasingly standardized infrastructure compete for a finite pool of capital, the ecosystem faces a systemic challenge that threatens genuine innovation and growth.

The multi-dimensional fragmentation problem

Liquidity in DeFi is fragmented across protocols, chains and token pairs. For new protocols, securing adequate liquidity is existential — without it, user adoption stalls, costs rise, yields fall and the growth flywheel fails to accrete value. This creates a fundamental challenge: every new DEX, lending platform or yield farm must compete for the same finite pool of capital, further dividing available liquidity. The demand for liquidity vastly outstrips the influx of new capital. 

The traditional finance concept of "cost of capital" has evolved into "cost of liquidity" in DeFi, but without standardized frameworks to price this risk, protocols struggle to acquire the capital they need to launch and grow effectively. Protocols use their native tokens, ecosystem funds and sometimes their own capital to attract early liquidity. Some under-incentivize, failing to attract liquidity providers. Others over-incentivize, depleting treasuries and creating sell pressure when token incentives unlock. Both approaches ultimately undermine long-term sustainability.

The VC-protocol tension

This mispricing creates a fundamental tension for projects with VC backing. Investors who fund portfolio companies via simple agreements for future tokens (SAFTs) want protocols to attract sufficient liquidity for growth and utility. However, aggressive liquidity incentive programs directly dilute their token holdings.

The result is often unsustainable tokenomics: high initial emissions to bootstrap liquidity, creating artificial success metrics that collapse when incentives decrease. This pattern hampers genuine innovation, as truly novel approaches face disproportionately higher costs to attract capital.

Market opacity and information asymmetry

The problem is compounded by lack of transparency. Most significant liquidity arrangements occur through private over-the-counter (OTC) deals with unclear terms. New protocols have no visibility into market rates for comparable arrangements, while established players and insider networks control capital flow.

Without standardized risk assessment frameworks, liquidity providers struggle to evaluate opportunities effectively. This leads to inconsistent risk premiums across similar protocols and capital concentration in projects with familiar designs rather than superior technology and innovation.

Toward a solution: a neutral liquidity layer

What the ecosystem needs is connectivity between capital and protocols — a chain-agnostic, protocol-neutral layer focused on efficient capital routing. Such a system would:

Establishing a system like this isn't about introducing new financial products, but creating a shared understanding of liquidity pricing that aligns incentives between capital allocators and protocols.

Looking forward

As DeFi matures, standardizing liquidity coordination and risk assessment will be essential for capital efficiency. The protocols that thrive should be those that solve real problems and bring real innovation to the space, not necessarily those with the most aggressive incentives. 

The challenge is clear: demand for liquidity in DeFi is effectively infinite and the finite supply is existentially important. Yet the infrastructure, services, and pricing mechanisms that determine how capital flows from holders to users have significantly lagged behind protocol innovation. Addressing this infrastructure gap represents not just an opportunity to increase efficiency, but a necessity for the sustainable growth of the entire DeFi ecosystem.

- Jason Hall, institutional client strategist, Turtle Club

Exclusive event alert for financial advisors:

Join CoinDesk for Wealth Management Day on May 15th at Consensus Toronto. Registered wealth advisors are provided with their own day of networking and learning where they will acquire timely and actionable information about digital assets. Approved advisors receive a complimentary 3-day Platinum Pass ($1,750 value) to Consensus.

Apply Today

In an earlier piece, I introduced the concept of the "Shopification of Wealth", or the idea that on-chain rails can lower the barriers to entry and radically scale operations for financial advisors and wealth managers. Just as Shopify enabled anyone to launch a retail business online, crypto is enabling a new generation of investment professionals to start and scale advisory businesses without the legacy layers of TradFi infrastructure.

This democratization of advice foreshadows broader changes in asset management. Because when you zoom out — beyond the advisor and beyond the assets — you start to see something else: a transformation in the investment strategies themselves, as well as in the machinery behind them.

Tokenization will reshape all asset classes

Beyond advice, crypto and tokenization are poised to re-engineer entire asset classes by making assets globally accessible, fractionalized, composable and tradable 24/7. Consider stablecoins, which in 2024 facilitated $27.6 trillion in on-chain transfers, surpassing the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard. The efficiency is clear: transactions settle instantly worldwide, with far lower friction and downtime. Even traditionally staid products like money market funds are going on-chain. Traditional money market funds charge around 10 to 25 basis points in fees, whereas crypto rails can trim those costs substantially. One Boston Consulting Group study estimates fund tokenization could add around17 basis points of annual return (or roughly $100 billion per year globally) by eliminating operational inefficiencies. In short, tokenization is making markets always-open and hyper-efficient, unlocking assets for a global investor base.

From asset transparency to strategy transparency

It’s now a consensus view that tokenization also brings greater asset transparency. On-chain reserves and transactions are often auditable in real-time. However, active investment strategies and managers remain a black box. We can monitor tokenized assets on-chain, but the logic of how portfolios are managed is still opaque when strategies reside off-chain. While anyone can inspect a DeFi lending contract’s holdings, one cannot yet peer into a hedge fund’s flows, allocations and economics the same way. The next frontier is bringing that same transparency and composability to the strategies and their managers themselves, not just the underlying assets.

Hedge funds today: large, exclusive and opaque

Hedge funds are privately managed pools of capital employing complex trading and risk management techniques to seek absolute returns. Globally, hedge funds oversee trillions in assets across strategies ranging from equities and credit to global macro and quant models. Their investor base is almost entirely institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals, often accessed through private banks or feeder funds. Direct investment typically requires being an accredited or qualified investor, with typical minimum commitments of $1 million or more (elite funds frequently demand $5 million to $10 million). 

Many investors gain exposure via fund-of-funds, which bundle multiple hedge funds for diversification but add another layer of fees, often ~1 to 1.5% annual management fees, plus 10% of performance on top of the underlying funds’ “2 and 20” fee structure. These vehicles remain opaque, disclosing minimal information about holdings or trades. Investors must trust managers who provide only periodic and partial insight into their strategies. Access is exclusive and information is scarce.

To view the rest of the article, please click here.

-  Miguel Kudry, co-founder and CEO, L1

As always, get the latest crypto news from coindesk.com and market updates from coindesk.com/indices.