Crypto’s mid-life crisis: Tokens need Nasdaq-style secondary markets | Opinion

Crypto has world-class launchpads and some of the most liquid spot markets in the world. New tokens can get minted, listed, and traded almost instantly. Once the unlocking or vesting contracts clear, there is plenty of liquidity for them to move.

In the middle of the token lifecycle, there is still a void. Billions in vested and locked allocations sit in limbo with no structured, transparent venues to move them, price them, or manage how they come into circulation.

When I first came into crypto trading around 2018, working on the desk of one of Hong Kong’s earliest Bitcoin exchanges, I saw how inefficiency and opacity create huge opportunities for a few and confusion for everyone else. We watched people fly in from Korea with suitcases of cash just to capture the kimchi premium. That kind of spread exists because markets are not joined up and information is not shared evenly.

That pattern keeps repeating in different forms throughout a token’s life. Opaque OTC deals and off-chain price discovery thrive, fueling price discrepancies, shaping retail expectations, and distorting the sustainability of token economies. Large holders negotiate in back channels. Prices get made in private chats. Volatility spills over into public markets later. By the time public markets adjust, exchanges may show one price, but private deals have used another; it is usually retail that pays for the gap.

Traditional finance solved a version of this problem a long time ago. Public markets require regulatory filings that disclose fundraising terms and discounted allocations for insiders and institutions. Platforms like Nasdaq Private Markets provide structured solutions for private companies to manage secondary trading and liquidity for their shares before a public offering. The lesson is clear: healthy markets need structured, transparent “mid-life markets” that keep liquidity orderly and accountable through the token’s lifecycle.

TradFi built the bridge; crypto skipped the step

In healthy capital markets, primary and secondary markets complement each other. You raise capital in the primary market. You rely on structured secondary layers to recycle liquidity, refine price discovery, and broaden distribution. That is how systems stay durable over decades instead of just surviving one cycle.

Crypto never really built that bridge. It jumped from issuance to spot exchanges and perpetuals. In many venues, for everyone who wins, someone else is forced to lose on the other side of a leveraged trade. That structure is fine for speculation. It is not how you build sustainable ownership or long-term liquidity.

Because the mid-life layer is missing, we live with predictable issues: price gaps between public and private markets, grey zone trading that is hard to supervise, and inconsistent valuations across venues.

RWAs make the gap harder to ignore

Real-world assets are now one of the most talked-about narratives in crypto. We’re starting to see credit, private debt, treasuries, and other yield-bearing instruments represented as tokens. In many ways, RWAs are perfectly suited for on-chain finance: they’re portable, familiar to TradFi, and tied to cash flows the real world already understands.

In practice, most of these assets still lack reliable secondary liquidity. Holders have no controlled way to exit positions. Institutions don’t have a standardized pricing layer that they trust at scale. Without a mid-life market, tokenization risks remaining a technical demo instead of becoming a real financial infrastructure.

If we want RWAs to carry serious TVL across multiple chains, liquidity can’t just exist at issuance and redemption. It has to circulate responsibly in between. That means secondary markets that can handle lockups, compliance, KYC, and distribution rules programmatically, not in spreadsheets and side emails.

What a crypto “mid-life market” should look like

A real mid-life market for tokens isn’t about recreating the TradFi bureaucracy on-chain. It’s about building a venue that reflects how programmable assets actually work. Issuers should know what’s trading and under what rules. Vesting and lockup conditions should remain intact by design. Pricing should be visible, and compliance should be enforced by smart contracts instead of paper.

Most importantly, access has to be fair. Today, the secondary market for locked tokens is dominated by institutions and professional desks. They have the relationships, the risk teams, and the patience to hold long-term positions in size. Retail rarely sees those terms.

The goal is to open that access, not by turning everyone into a degen, but by giving more people a shot at value-focused positions if they’re willing to be patient and buy in size. In traditional markets, if you can buy in bulk, accept a lockup, and take a long-term view, you get a better price. There’s no reason crypto shouldn’t work the same way,  and no reason only a handful of funds should enjoy that structure.

A proper mid-life market lets a holder buy discounted locked tokens through transparent, issuer-aware rails, hold them through the agreed period, and even relist them as conditions change. Every time those tokens trade again, the value moves through on-chain contracts instead of disappearing into phone calls and PDFs.

If crypto does not build this layer

If we leave this gap unaddressed, OTC channels will remain the default. Volatility will keep being amplified by information shocks rather than fundamentals. Information will stay asymmetric.

RWA adoption will slow under liquidity constraints, because serious capital won’t move into assets it can’t reliably enter and exit. Institutions will hesitate to scale exposure beyond a handful of blue-chips. Regulators will feel compelled to patch over the shadow activity using blunt tools. 

In that world, crypto ends up copying the worst parts of legacy finance, such as opacity, insider advantage, and uneven access, without importing the safeguards that made those markets resilient.

Every mature financial system has a structured secondary layer. Crypto needs the same continuity between issuance and exchange if it wants to be treated as long-term infrastructure rather than just another speculative arena.

A Nasdaq Private Market style infrastructure, built for programmable assets, gives tokens a predictable mid-life, fairer markets, and real tokenization. It turns locked allocations into visible inventory instead of hidden risk.  It fills the gap between locked and liquid.

This missing layer will decide whether Web3 liquidity becomes sustainable, accessible, and trusted globally, or whether we keep chasing the same inefficiencies we thought we were here to fix.