Why Tokenization Doesn't Guarantee Liquidity with Fission

Franklin Bi sits down with Jon Shaffer, CEO of Fission, and Steve Bendit, Chief Revenue Officer, to discuss Pantera leading their Series A and why private markets, not public equities, are the real tokenization opportunity.

Private markets represent roughly $18 trillion in assets, yet much of the industry still relies on manual processes, from subscription agreements to ownership transfers. Even the world’s largest asset managers operate within these traditional systems.

Tokenization is a step forward, but putting a fund onchain doesn’t automatically create liquidity or expand distribution. Real liquidity requires more than technology. It requires capital, infrastructure, and someone willing to underwrite the risk.

Key Topics:

• The core insight: tokenization does not create liquidity and it does not create distribution. On-chain distribution is a function of liquidity, and liquidity has to be instantiated by a third party willing to underwrite the risk.
• Why private markets instead of public equities: US public markets are already among the most efficient in the world, so blockchain mainly solves distribution there. Alternatives are not even digitized, let alone tokenized.
• Pricing duration risk, not NAV: Fission does not reprice the underlying basket. It prices the risk of holding the asset through the next redemption window to give investors an early exit, which looks more like receivables financing than prop trading.
• Why this is a credit-based liquidity market: the framing keeps asset managers' marks intact and brings NAV lenders and receivables financiers into the liquidity pool alongside traditional market makers.
• Why private markets need their own venue: different valuation methodologies, different settlement and cross-chain infrastructure, different exchange rules, and a different breed of liquidity provider than single-name equities
• Breaking the yield ceiling: the market is boxed in at 6% to 7% because that is the highest you can get with baked-in liquidity. The goal is double-digit returns with daily liquidity on 30 to 90 day products.
• Liquidity as a feature of the token, not a bolt-on: how early exits, collateralization, and levered vaults change what on-chain allocators are willing to hold, and why it removes the need for asset managers to carry their own liquidity sleeves
• The institutional inflection: Apollo and Securitize with ACRED, BlackRock and Ondo with curated portfolios, ARK opening the door to tokenized venture, and Hamilton Lane filing to tokenize 40 Act funds directly
• Where AI fits: pricing engines for duration risk and gating probability, AI portfolio construction for fund-of-funds baskets, and eventually agentic rebalancing that keeps a portfolio inside its own risk limits
• The hot take: the CLARITY Act failing in Congress may be the best thing that could have happened to tokenization, because SEC rulemaking is what actually moves the needle