Neil Staunton, CEO and co-founder of Superset, says stablecoins have scaled quickly, but the liquidity infrastructure supporting them has not. In this Q&A, he explains why liquidity fragmentation is now a bottleneck—and how Superset aims to unify liquidity so stablecoins can operate as institutional-grade financial infrastructure.ㅡEd.
What are you building with Superset?
At a high level, we’re rebuilding the plumbing underneath stablecoins. Stablecoins themselves have scaled incredibly fast, but the way liquidity moves around them really hasn’t.
Today, liquidity is chopped up across dozens of blockchains and venues. That fragmentation creates friction everywhere. Execution gets worse, costs go up, and operating at scale becomes unnecessarily complex. Superset decouples liquidity from settlement, so liquidity can behave like shared infrastructure rather than something trapped on a single chain.
That shift is what allows stablecoins to move from being “good enough” for smaller use cases to actually functioning as dependable financial infrastructure.
Why is liquidity fragmentation becoming a serious problem now?
Because stablecoins have outgrown their original use case. They’re no longer just a trading instrument. They’re being used for payments, treasury management, FX-style activity, and increasingly as a settlement layer.
The issue is that the market structure still looks like it did when volumes were much smaller. Liquidity is split across chains, currencies, and venues, which works fine at low scale. But once you start talking about larger transactions or institutional use, that model breaks down very quickly. Thin liquidity means slippage, unpredictable execution, and operational risk—all things institutions simply won’t tolerate.
How is Superset’s approach different from existing cross-chain or DeFi solutions?
Most cross-chain solutions try to solve fragmentation by moving assets around or by subsidizing liquidity with incentives. That can help temporarily, but it’s expensive and doesn’t scale well.
We’re approaching the problem from a market-structure perspective instead. Superset unifies liquidity at a virtual layer and lets participants access that depth regardless of where settlement happens. It’s much closer to how traditional FX markets evolved: participants care about price, depth, and execution—not which underlying rails a trade settles on.
That’s the key difference with what we do. We’re not patching fragmentation; we’re removing it entirely.
What needs to change for stablecoins to be trusted as institutional-grade financial infrastructure?
Institutions care about reliability under real conditions. Stablecoins have already proven there’s massive demand, but liquidity today is still spread thin across too many places.
When liquidity is fragmented, pricing becomes inconsistent and execution risk grows as volumes increase. To be trusted at scale, liquidity needs to be treated as shared infrastructure—something that can support large trades efficiently and predictably, regardless of chain or venue. Once you fix that, capital becomes more efficient, execution improves, and stablecoins start to behave like the financial primitive they’re meant to be.
Asia, particularly Korea, has been an early adopter of digital finance. How do you view the region?
Asia has been very pragmatic when it comes to financial innovation. In markets like Korea, you see strong technical capability paired with real institutional and consumer demand.
That combination matters. As stablecoins become embedded in everyday financial workflows, regions that invest early in execution quality and infrastructure (not just surface-level adoption) will have a meaningful advantage. We see Asia as a region that understands that distinction.
What role do stablecoins play in the future of global finance?
Stablecoins are one of the clearest examples of crypto delivering real-world utility. They already enable faster settlement, reduce counterparty risk, and make global value transfer far more accessible.
The missing piece is scale. If liquidity infrastructure doesn’t evolve, stablecoins will remain useful but constrained. If it does, they become foundational in supporting global payments, FX, and settlement in a way that simply isn’t possible with today’s systems. That’s the future we’re building toward.
