Decentralised finance’s expansion across dozens of blockchains is fuelling a new wave of cross-chain trading terminals as liquidity fragmentation becomes a structural constraint rather than a temporary inconvenience.
During the 2025 memecoin surge, traders navigating fast-moving markets on Ethereum and Solana reported spending more time managing wallets, bridges and gas fees than executing trades.
Liquidity fragmentation refers to the same asset trading simultaneously across multiple blockchains and decentralised exchanges, with each instance residing in separate pools with varying depth, fees and execution characteristics.
“Liquidity is not scarce in DeFi,”
Said Armaan Kalsi, CEO and co-founder of Genius Trading, adding:
“What’s scarce is the ability to access it efficiently.”
While Ethereum still leads in total value locked, significant liquidity now exists across Solana, BNB Chain and numerous Layer 2 networks, forcing traders to move capital between chains to capture optimal pricing.
The dispersion has tangible costs, with price discrepancies across networks and estimated annual inefficiencies of $1.3 billion in tokenised markets, alongside more than $2 billion lost to bridge exploits since 2021.
As a result, developers are building unified trading terminals designed to aggregate liquidity across ecosystems, reduce slippage and eliminate the operational friction that increasingly defines cross-chain DeFi execution.
At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $1,927.21.