Crypto Long & Short: When Capital Can't Move Fast Enough, Markets Pay the Price

In this week's Crypto Long & Short, LMAX Group's Jenna Wright argues that markets break down not from too little capital but from capital stuck in the wrong place — trapped by settlement cycles while risk reprices by the minute. She makes the case that stablecoins and tokenization are quietly becoming the plumbing that lets money move as fast as the risk it supports.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc., CoinDesk Indices or its owners and affiliates.

Markets Rarely Break Because Capital Is Scarce

By Jenna Wright, Managing Director, Digital Assets, LMAX Group

Markets rarely break down because there is too little capital in circulation. More often, they come under strain because capital is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recent volatility driven by geopolitical tensions has reinforced that lesson. Institutions had money, collateral, and balance-sheet capacity available, but too much of it was trapped in systems still governed by batch processing, cut-off times, and settlement cycles. Risk was repricing by the minute; collateral was not.

This mismatch is no longer a back-office inconvenience — it is a market-structure problem. When institutions cannot mobilize collateral quickly enough to support their positions, liquidity thins, spreads widen, and price moves become unnecessarily sharp. The problem is not volatility alone, but market infrastructure that has failed to keep pace with the markets it serves.

Markets Are Always On — Infrastructure Is Not

The shift is already visible. Digital assets trade around the clock. FX and derivatives markets are moving steadily toward more continuous activity. Investors increasingly want instant access and an instant response. Yet much of the infrastructure that supports institutional trading was designed for a world of fixed market hours and end-of-day processes.

That gap matters most when markets are under stress. Collateral is still split across venues, custodians, asset classes, and jurisdictions. Companies still pre-position capital because settlement may take one or two days. The U.S. securities industry's 2024 transition from T+2 to T+1 settlement compressed one part of that window, but it did not resolve the cross-asset and cross-jurisdictional friction — a fund holding Treasuries in one custody chain still cannot pledge them as collateral for a gold or energy position in another without operational delay. Institutions still manage exposure around cut-offs that make little sense in markets that move continuously.

The consequences were visible in January. LMAX Group processed more than $300 billion in total volume in a single week, including $60 billion in gold products alone. Across the wider market, some institutions were forced out of positions overnight because they could not move assets out of equity or bond portfolios quickly enough to fund their gold or energy exposure. The collateral was there. It simply could not move fast enough.

That is the flaw volatility exposes. Markets have become faster, more global, and more interconnected, while capital movement remains slow and fragmented. Closing that gap requires a different way of thinking about cash, collateral, and settlement.

Stablecoins Are No Longer Peripheral

Settlement remains one of the weakest links in capital markets. Institutions can execute trades globally in milliseconds, but the transfer of value that supports those trades can still take days. That delay creates funding pressure, operational risk, and unnecessary capital drag.

This is where stablecoins become relevant to institutional markets. Strip away the noise and the use case is straightforward: they allow cash-like value to move with the speed and programmability of digital assets. For firms still working around T+1 or T+2 settlement, nostro and vostro accounts, and hard cut-off times, that is not a marginal improvement — it changes what is operationally possible.

The market has already moved beyond theory. Stablecoin market capitalization is now around $320 billion, and recent industry data points to record levels of on-chain transfer activity. The more important point, however, is not the headline number. It is that regulated institutions are beginning to treat stablecoins and tokenized cash as settlement infrastructure rather than a crypto-market curiosity. Wells Fargo's announcement this week that it will launch tokenized deposits for round-the-clock corporate payments — starting with USD-to-GBP transactions this fall — is a concrete signal that major banks are moving from exploration to deployment.

That distinction matters. A stablecoin does not need to replace the financial system to be useful. Its role is more practical: to allow money to move at the same speed as the risk it is supporting. In continuous markets, that ability will become table stakes. Any institution that cannot settle, fund, or rebalance in real time will be carrying a disadvantage before the trade even begins.

Tokenization Is the Other Half of the Equation

Stablecoins address the movement of cash. Tokenization addresses the movement of assets — and in the January example, it was the inability to move assets quickly that forced institutions out of positions. By representing securities and other assets as programmable units of value, tokenization makes collateral more portable. Assets that would otherwise sit inside delayed settlement cycles can be pledged, transferred, or released more quickly. Trapped capital can be put back to work.

This is why tokenization should not be dismissed as another efficiency project. It changes the way trust, settlement, and risk management are organized. When cash, securities, and collateral can all exist on programmable rails, the old separation between asset classes starts to look less like a necessity and more like a constraint. Regulators are beginning to build frameworks around that shift: the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting financial institutions on using tokenized bullion as wholesale collateral — a step directly relevant to London's gold market, which accounts for roughly 70% of global notional gold trading volume.

The Hard Part Is Not the Concept — It Is the Build

The direction is clear. The difficulty is execution. Today's market infrastructure still reflects a chain of separate processes: execution, clearing, settlement, and custody. Each hand-off adds delay. Each boundary creates another point where capital can become stuck. That model is increasingly out of step with markets that expect exposure, funding, and settlement to be managed continuously.

These are operational and engineering challenges, not abstract debates about market philosophy. They require infrastructure that can be upgraded without downtime, risk models that work intraday rather than at the end of the day, and settlement mechanisms that can support institutional scale. The firms that solve this will not simply become more efficient. They will set a competitive standard for markets over the next decade.

The Cost of Waiting Is Rising

Every major shift in market structure looks slow until it suddenly does not. Electronic trading, central clearing, and shorter settlement cycles all followed that pattern. Adoption begins unevenly, then accelerates once the advantages become impossible to ignore.

Technology is available and the use case is clear. What remains is the willingness to modernize the infrastructure that determines whether capital can be used when markets need it most. The U.S. Senate's planned Clarity Act vote after the August recess adds a policy dimension — the bill would establish a clearer regulatory perimeter for digital assets, and its outcome could shape how quickly tokenized settlement reaches institutional scale. Until infrastructure catches up, markets will continue to pay for a simple but costly flaw: capital may be abundant, but abundance means little if it cannot move efficiently.

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Headlines of the Week

By Francisco Rodrigues

This week's headlines show institutional crypto shifting further into regulated financial infrastructure. Coinbase and Wintermute kept securing regulatory victories, while Wells Fargo joined a major race in the sector.

Wells Fargo joins the race to tokenize Wall Street's settlement rails: The bank will introduce tokenized deposits this fall for select corporate and commercial clients, starting with round-the-clock U.S. dollar-to-British pound transactions and expanding to more clients, countries, and currencies in 2027. Read more

Wintermute lands U.S. broker-dealer status in Wall Street push: The market maker's U.S. arm registered with the SEC and joined FINRA, allowing it to trade stocks and options, provide ETF liquidity, and act as an authorized participant for crypto-linked funds. Read more

Coinbase picks Abu Dhabi for its global tokenized-asset push: The exchange secured permission from Abu Dhabi Global Market's regulator to arrange investment deals and custody tokenized securities, with plans to issue digital securities backed by shares. Read more

Senate starts Clarity Act floor process ahead of September test: Majority Leader John Thune filed a motion to proceed, positioning the bill for an initial vote after the August recess, but it still needs 60 votes and agreements on ethics, enforcement, and stablecoin rewards. Read more

U.K. FCA drafts tokenized-gold rules for wholesale markets: The regulator is consulting financial institutions on using tokenized bullion as wholesale collateral as London defends a market accounting for 70% of global notional gold trading volume. Read more

Chart of the Week

Average BTC/ETH funding has crept back to approximately 5% annualized, now above the 3-month T-bill rate (~3.8%) — yet Ethena (ENA) has barely reacted. The disconnect is structural: crypto basis is down to approximately 1.5% of ENA's backing, so the token's funding sensitivity has all but faded.

Recommended Listening, Reading, and Viewing

Listen: "Strategy CEO: 'We are the central bank of Bitcoin'." On CoinDesk's Public Keys from the NYSE floor, Jennifer Sanasie is joined by co-host Tim Grant, CEO of Deus X Capital, Strategy President and CEO Phong Le, and Bitwise Asset Management Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen.

Read: In Crypto for Advisors, Maria Golenkov, Partner at DLA, LLC, explains how the EU's MiCA framework is the blueprint for future U.S. crypto regulation. Then, in "Ask an Expert," Felix Xu, co-founder and CEO of ARPA Network and co-founder of ZX Squared Capital, answers questions around why operational risk is the primary investment risk in digital assets.

Watch: "U.S. Senate opened first stage of CLARITY Act voting," with CoinDesk's Sam Ewen hosting CoinDesk Daily.

Upcoming Event: CoinDesk's Policy & Regulation event is September 22 in Washington, D.C.