On 13 February 2025 BX Digital hosted a virtual seminar that addressed the question: “Token markets need liquidity: Where will they get it from?” The importance of the topic is obvious. A market in which assets can be bought and sold quickly without moving the price is bound to grow more quickly than one in which assets can be bought and sold slowly, if at all, and only by moving the price in an adverse direction. By this criterion, the cryptocurrency markets, let alone the tokenised asset markets, lack sufficient liquidity.The conventional solution is to attract more issuers and investors. Unfortunately, it is fallacious. The experience of traditional markets shows that liquidity is not generated sufficiently by buyers and sellers alone. Furthermore, liquidity must be manufactured by market-makers, lead brokers, securities dealers, inter-broker dealers, exchanges and trading venues, banks, investment banks, and principal and high frequency trading firms. Yet blockchain was invented precisely to get rid of intermediaries such as these. So the purpose of the discussion hosted by BX Digital was to test whether blockchain-based finance can indeed scale without intermediaries, whether tokenisation can make the generation of liquidity more efficient and what exchanges can do to encourage the growth of liquidity.

The seminar, held in conjunction with Future of Finance, attracted 116 registrants. They heard Lidia Kurt, CEO of BX Digital, Michael J. Cyrus, Head of Short-Term Products, Equity Finance & FX at DekaBank, Mike Reed, Head of Partnership Development for Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, Jasmine Burgess, Chief Risk Officer at Coinbase Asset Management, and Lloyd Wahed, Founder and CEO at Members Capital Management, discuss the question from a variety of angles. The registrants contributed to the discussion by completing an on-line poll. 

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