On-chain finance is scaling, but it is scaling in pieces. Assets and liquidity are spread across public blockchains, private and permissioned networks, and the legacy market utilities that still anchor clearing and settlement. Without reliable connections between them, tokenization risks recreating the silos it promised to eliminate. The firms that can link these systems securely and at scale are becoming indispensable to how markets function.

This session brings together leaders working to connect these environments. They’ll discuss the cost of fragmented liquidity, cross-chain messaging and asset transfer, custody models across multiple networks, and integration with existing market utilities. Panelists will also confront the hardest technical and legal question: how settlement finality is established when a transaction crosses networks with different rules. Over the near term, panelists will consider whether markets will converge on common standards or a small number of dominant networks, and who will own the connectivity layer as it becomes core financial infrastructure, and other factors including: