TLDR

• Eli Lilly stockpiled $1.5 billion of Orforglipron weight-loss pill before expected April 2026 FDA approval
• Strategy aims to prevent supply shortages that hurt Zepbound and Mounjaro launches in 2022
• Novo Nordisk’s oral Wegovy reached 50,000 prescriptions by January after December 2025 approval
• Orforglipron could hit $13 billion in annual sales by 2031 according to GlobalData forecasts
• Company investing $27 billion in four new U.S. manufacturing facilities for weight-loss drugs

Eli Lilly disclosed $1.5 billion worth of pre-launch Orforglipron inventory in its 2025 annual report. The weight-loss pill awaits FDA approval expected in April 2026.

Eli Lilly and Company, LLY

The massive stockpile represents a calculated move to avoid past mistakes. In 2022, Eli Lilly couldn’t meet demand for injectable drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro. Patients switched to compounded alternatives when they couldn’t find branded products.

Those shortages lasted until late 2024. They cost the company revenue and market share during a critical growth period.

The FDA fast-tracked Orforglipron’s review using a Commissioner’s National Priority Review Voucher. Eli Lilly plans a major marketing push this summer when shipments begin.

Chasing Novo Nordisk’s Early Lead

Novo Nordisk launched oral Wegovy in January 2026 after December 2025 FDA approval. The Danish company captured first-mover advantage in the oral weight-loss pill market.

By the end of January, oral Wegovy had 50,000 prescriptions. UBS analysts expect 400,000 prescriptions in Q1 2026.

Pills appeal to patients who avoid injections. Current options like Zepbound require weekly shots. The oral format removes needle anxiety from the treatment equation.

Eli Lilly started building Orforglipron inventory over a year ago. The company reported $550 million worth of the drug in February 2025.

GlobalData analyst Shehroz Mahmood called the stockpile “a decisive effort to avoid repeating the supply constraints that plagued its Mounjaro and Zepbound rollouts.”

Billion-Dollar Sales Projections

GlobalData projects Orforglipron could generate $13 billion in annual sales by 2031. That forecast assumes FDA approval and successful commercialization.

Eli Lilly’s weight-loss drug portfolio drove 45% revenue growth in 2025. Mounjaro brought in $23 billion. Zepbound added $13.5 billion.

The company is building four new U.S. manufacturing facilities with $27 billion in investment. At least three will produce weight-loss therapies. Eli Lilly announced the fourth facility this month.

Orforglipron showed positive results in clinical trials. The once-daily pill fits into an industry shift toward more flexible obesity treatments.

Mahmood noted that while Novo Nordisk has early momentum, “it remains to be seen whether Eli Lilly can yet again take the spotlight, as it did in the competition for injectable therapies.”

The $1.5 billion Orforglipron stockpile makes up most of Eli Lilly’s total pre-launch inventory. The company expects huge global demand once the pill reaches pharmacy shelves this summer.

• Monero (XMR) faces short-term selling pressure below key moving averages.
• On-chain activity remains strong despite exchange delistings.
• Support lies at $300 while the immediate resistance sits near $381.

After reaching an all-time high near $798 in January, Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency has experienced significant short-term volatility.

In the last month alone, XMR has retraced over 44% from its recent highs.

The coin is currently trading around $331, after modest gains over the past 24 hours, but still well below its peak.

Growing selling pressure

Recent price action shows that XMR is struggling below key moving averages, including the 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages (EMA).

These levels are critical as they often guide the sentiment of market participants.

Selling pressure has been compounded by a decrease in futures open interest, which dropped around 11% in a single day.

The long-to-short ratio has also shifted in favour of short positions, indicating a prevailing bearish bias.

If Monero fails to hold above the psychological $315 level, it could open the door for further declines.

Technical analysts suggest that a break below $315 may trigger a deeper correction, potentially testing support near $300.

Despite this, the short-term weakness does not reflect a collapse in user interest.

Strong on-chain activity and adoption

Monero’s core network activity remains remarkably resilient.

Transaction volumes have stayed above pre-2022 levels, even as numerous exchanges have delisted the cryptocurrency.

This suggests that the demand for private transactions continues, independent of mainstream trading platforms.

Darknet marketplaces are increasingly favouring XMR as the payment method of choice.

Almost half of the newly launched privacy-focused markets now operate exclusively on Monero, underscoring its growing adoption in niche sectors.

Even though ransomware operators still prefer Bitcoin (BTC)  due to its liquidity, Monero continues to hold a strong position among users who value privacy.

Despite exchange delistings and enforcement pressure, XMR activity on Monero remains above pre-2022 levels.

Key findings from our latest research:

🔺 48% of new darknet markets in 2025 are XMR-only
🔺 Most ransomware payments still occur in BTC — liquidity matters
🔺 14–15% of… pic.twitter.com/BYPJMrLaJN

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— TRM Labs (@trmlabs) February 16, 2026

Network-level observations also show that a small percentage of Monero nodes behave differently from the standard protocol.

These anomalies do not compromise the cryptocurrency’s privacy features but indicate subtle variations in how real-world networks function.

Overall, these factors demonstrate that Monero maintains a strong and active user base, even in the face of regulatory and exchange restrictions.

Monero price forecast

Monero is balancing between short-term price weakness and long-term network resilience.

The immediate support lies around $300. Holding this level is crucial for preventing further downside.

If $300 fails to hold, the next major support is between $290 and $231.

On the upside, Monero needs to reclaim levels above $381 to ease selling pressure and potentially resume its bullish trend.

Short-term traders should be cautious, as momentum indicators suggest room for continued volatility.

Meanwhile, long-term holders can take confidence from the sustained network activity and growing adoption in privacy-focused markets.

A prominent crypto company continues to praise XRP, while Ripple’s stablecoin performed better than USDC on one front.

XRP has experienced a significant decline over the past few months, yet interest in the asset (and the company behind it) remains high.

In the following lines, we will touch upon the latest and most intriguing developments surrounding Ripple’s ecosystem.

Investors Want In?

Ripple’s global event, XRP Community Day, which is dedicated to the community of proponents, developers, and holders, was held last week. It brought together numerous executives and well-known figures from the crypto industry to discuss XRP’s growing usage, institutional adoption, and other trending topics.

One participant was Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary (Head of Product & Research at Grayscale), who disclosed that advisors at the digital asset manager are “constantly asked” by clients about XRP. She added that, in some cases, Ripple’s cross-border token is the second-most discussed asset after Bitcoin (BTC).

Grayscale is among the companies that introduced a spot XRP exchange-traded fund (ETF) with 100% exposure to the coin. This happened in late 2025, shortly after Canary Capital became the first to launch such a product in the United States.

Grayscale’s investment vehicle, dubbed GXRP, drew strong interest after its debut, with daily net inflows topping $30 million on several occasions. However, over the past few weeks, the trend has shifted, with frequent negative netflows.

RLUSD Outperforms USDC on This Front

Ripple’s stablecoin, called RLUSD, saw the light of day in December 2024 and has since made significant progress. The product, pegged 1:1 to the American dollar, gained support from many exchanges and renowned banking institutions, including the oldest US bank, BNY Mellon.

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Earlier this year, the London-based fintech company LMAX Group partnered with Ripple to integrate RLUSD into its institutional trading infrastructure, while Zand (a bank in the UAE) also embraced the token.

RLUSD’s market cap has exceeded $1.5 billion, a significant milestone given its relatively short history. X user SMQKE revealed that the product has grown “much faster” than Circle’s USDC in its first year.

XRP Price Outlook

The past week has been quite turbulent for Ripple’s native cryptocurrency, with its valuation ranging from $1.35 to $1.66. Currently, it trades at approximately $1.45, representing a 2% daily decline.

It is important to note that the surge to the local high occurred over the weekend and was short-lived, prompting some analysts, such as Ali Martinez, to describe the 2-week candle closure as a gravestone doji. This is a candlestick pattern in which the price spikes during the period but closes near where it started, resembling an upside-down “T.” Martinez noted that the last time this formation appeared on the weekly chart, XRP’s price dropped by 46%.

Other analysts take a more optimistic view. X user BitGuru believes XRP is “coming out of a prolonged downtrend” and is attempting to reclaim key support at approximately $1.50. Should it succeed, a recovery to $1.80-$2 is possible, they predicted.

As global capital markets accelerate toward blockchain-enabled asset digitization, South Korea is positioning itself as a strategically significant jurisdiction in this transformation. The shift is not being driven by speculative enthusiasm, but by deliberate financial modernization. With one of the most advanced fintech ecosystems in Asia, a highly digital-native investor base, and a regulatory framework that is progressively adapting to digital securities, Korea offers a structured environment for real world asset tokenization to evolve beyond experimentation.

What distinguishes Korea from many other markets is its institutional orientation. Rather than centering growth on retail crypto activity, the country is exploring how tokenized securities, fractionalized assets, and blockchain-based settlement models can be integrated into existing financial architecture. This measured and compliance-aware approach signals a long-term commitment to infrastructure development rather than short-term market cycles.

For global enterprises, asset managers, and technology providers, the Korean RWA landscape represents more than a regional opportunity. It reflects a market preparing to align traditional finance with digital asset innovation in a regulated, scalable, and institutionally credible manner—making it particularly relevant for organizations pursuing sustainable expansion strategies in Asia’s evolving tokenization economy.

Korean RWA Market Overview

South Korea is emerging as a key hub for real world asset tokenization, driven by clear regulations, a tech-savvy financial ecosystem, and growing institutional interest. Platforms like Korbit—recently acquired by Mirae Asset for $92M—highlight the country’s push toward regulated digital asset markets.

While retail adoption is strong, institutions are seeking robust, compliant infrastructure for complex assets, creating demand for institutional RWA tokenization platforms. This evolving landscape presents a strategic opportunity for Antier to deploy institutional-grade RWA solutions and power Korea’s next-generation asset tokenization platforms.

What’s Accelerating Korea’s RWA Momentum?

The real-world assets market in Korea has entered an explosive period of growth as both institutional and retail investors are looking to explore the use of blockchain technology in the ownership of real-world asset tokenization. The convergence of increasing regulatory clarity regarding RWAs, improved digital infrastructure and a strong appetite among investors to invest in RWAs has allowed the tokenization of RWAs to move from being an innovation in the asset ecosystem to an accepted, mainstream RWA diversification strategy. As a result, companies are looking for RWA tokenization solutions that provide compliant, liquid, and transparent transaction solutions, while financial institutions are looking for institutional RWA tokenization platforms that are capable of providing secure and efficient solutions for the tokenization of more complex RWA.

Key drivers of this growth include: 

1. Clear Regulatory Guidelines

The regulatory agencies in Korea have provided detailed and clear regulatory guidelines concerning RWAs, allowing institutions to have a clear base on which to explore RWA tokenized investment opportunities. The only area that remains uncertain is whether the establishment of standard compliance and reporting protocols will have an impact on the adoption of asset tokenization platforms

2. Institutional Adoption and Strategic Investments

More institutional players in the form of Mirae Asset acquiring Korbit are looking for market opportunities in the form of regulated RWA markets, reflecting a need for and desire of institutional players to participate as RWA investors. There is a significant increase in institutional demand for institutional-grade RWA solutions that can support the volume of transactions and complexity of asset classes associated with large institutional RWA investments.

3. Technology-Driven Infrastructure

The country’s fintech world is going through major innovation as it integrates blockchain technology with traditional financial institutions. Advanced RWA tokenization solutions have created a means for the extremely fast transfer of ownership of assets, fractional ownership of assets, and a high degree of security for holding and transferring tokenized investments.

4. Investor Diversification Demand

Investors who are retail and institutional are looking to acquire ownership of Real World Assets through blockchain technology due to the benefits it provides, such as liquidity, transparency, and fractional ownership. The growing interest from both retail and institutional investors continues to create the need for strong institutional RWA tokenization platforms.

5. Competitive Market Timing

The maturity of South Korea’s market and its early adoption of tokenized asset solutions make it the right time to provide a strong platform, such as Antier’s, that can connect the traditional financial markets to the blockchain for institutional-grade RWA solutions to satisfy the need for next-generation investment products.

Critical Gaps in Korea’s Asset Tokenization Platform Infrastructure

Korea’s real-world asset tokenization ecosystem has significant infrastructure gaps despite strong regulatory intent and growing institutional interest. While many platforms were initially created for crypto trading, they have been unable to support the digitisation of complex real-world assets at scale. With increasing demand for regulated and institution-grade offerings, the gaps created by the above-mentioned limitations are more pronounced, showing the need for purpose-built RWA tokenization solutions and enterprise-grade platforms.

Key gaps hindering mass market adoption:

1. Limited Institutional-Grade Architecture

Most platforms do not have the necessary robustness and feature set to build institutional quality for large issuers, custodians, and asset managers. The current absence of a complete institutional RWA tokenization platform prevents secure issuance, lifecycle management, and governance of tokenized assets.

2. Compliance-Centric Architecture Shortcomings

As regulations continue to evolve, there are many protocols that have not been able to embed compliance into their protocols. For example, many features such as performing investor KYC checks (i.e., identification), transfer restrictions, and audit-ready reporting are typically disenfranchised across multiple asset tokenization platforms, which compromises the trust level of these platforms by the issuer and investor.

3. Limited Integration to Traditional Finance Infrastructure

Connectivity between RWA tokenisation and traditional finance institutions (i.e., banks, custodians) remains lacking. The lack of thorough integration will prevent RWA tokenisation from providing the operational efficiency and settlement reliability associated with traditional finance institutions.

4. Limitations on Performance and Scalability

With an increase in the number of institutions participating on a platform, that platform must be able to work with larger transaction volumes, more asset classes, and cross-border use cases. Most current infrastructures lack the scalability required to sustain institutional-grade RWA solutions as they continue to grow.

5. Fragmented Asset Lifecycle Management

The process of going from onboarding and token issuance to secondary trading and redemption of an asset typically does not have full lifecycle management. This siloed approach creates operational risks and demonstrates the need for fully integrated enterprise-grade RWA tokenisation solutions.

How Can Antier Power Korea’s Next-Generation RWA Infrastructure?

With the transition of South Korea into a compliant digital asset ecosystem, institutional frameworks need to be secure, scalable, and compliant for real-world asset tokenization. With its extensive blockchain knowledge as well as its financial and regulatory knowledge, Antier will develop customized RWA tokenization solutions to support South Korea’s evolving RWA landscape.

Antier provides solutions for next-gen RWA by:

1. Domain-Driven Expert Team

A cross-functional expert team comprised of blockchain engineers, tokenization architects, and compliance experts, all of whom are highly experienced in creating global asset tokenization platforms. They will assist with the creation of secure technical designs, strong asset structure models, and secure smart contracts.

2. Institutional-grade Platforms

Antier provides institutional-grade scalable platforms for RWA tokenization, with a variety of asset classes, capable of high transaction volumes, with permissioned access control, advanced lifecycle management, and meeting the expectations of financial institutions and regulated entities.

3. Compliance-embedded smart contracts

Antier delivers institutional-grade RWA tokenization solutions that are fully compliant with all regulatory requirements by embedding compliance regulations within the token framework — KYC and AML regulations, whitelisting of investors, restrictions on transfers, and automated reporting.

4. Regulatory Structuring and Localization Support 

Antier helps to design token models that follow financial guidelines for the specific laws in the country and to make sure the solutions are technically viable and ready for the regulations that will apply to RWA tokenization in Korea’s changing legal environment. 

5. Seamless Integration with Traditional Finance

Antier can connect traditional bank systems, custody services, and reporting systems so that real-world asset tokenization projects will function properly with current financial systems. By combining these three areas of specialty in service, technology, and compliance, Antier is poised to provide scalable infrastructure for the next generation of RWA marketplaces in Korea with future-proof capabilities.

Grab the  First-Mover Advantage in Korea’s Tokenized Economy

By deploying robust RWA tokenization solutions and launching compliant, scalable asset tokenization platforms, institutions can establish credibility before the market reaches saturation. With the right institutional RWA tokenization platform and future-ready, institutional-grade RWA solutions, market participants can move beyond experimentation—building sustainable leadership in Korea’s next-generation tokenized economy.

• Raydium price pumped more than 15% as bulls tested the $0.75 level.
• Gains come amid a notable jump in perpetuals volume on the Solana-based decentralized exchange.
• RAY’s daily trading volume exploded by more than 500%.

Raydium trends as one of the top gainers in the crypto market in early trading on February 17, 2026, with the RAY token up 15% in the past 24 hours.

The token’s dramatic surge aligns with an explosion in daily trading volume and a retest of $0.75, which sees bulls now target a potential rebound to the critical price level of $1.

All this comes as top altcoins, including Ethereum, XRP and Solana, mirror the bearish pressure around Bitcoin.

Why is the Raydium price up?

Raydium benefits from Solana ecosystem momentum, with optimism around SOL also reflected in RAY. But this latest pump in the token comes as SOL struggles near $80.

A sharp increase in liquidity provision and swaps on Raydium’s automated market maker signals renewed confidence in the Solana-based decentralized exchange.

While there is no specific catalyst for the price surge in the past 24 hours, it appears fresh perps listings are amplifying volume.

Raydium recently announced trading support for  $TSLA, $NVDA, $XAG, $NAS100, $XAU, $SPX500, and $GOOGL, offering up to 20x leverage.

Trade $TSLA, $NVDA, $XAG, $NAS100, $XAU, $SPX500, and $GOOGL with up to 20x leverage. pic.twitter.com/wVAD2X3xgl

— Raydium (@Raydium) February 16, 2026

With potential macroeconomic shifts pointing to fresh gains, speculation is at a new level.

On-chain data indicates the platform is seeing heightened activity, with perpetuals volume skyrocketing past $6 billion amid notable user growth.

RAY’s gains reflect this frenzy, and volume has exploded. Over the past 24 hours, bulls pushing to break above $0.75 have seen daily volumes spike 580% and surpass $118 million.

Raydium price forecast as bulls target breakout above $1

Bears remain in control across much of the crypto market, and RAY’s performance in the past several months highlights this.

The token is well off lows of $0.54 seen earlier in the month, and boasts a 22% uptick from lows seen in the past week.

However, price continues to hover below a key downtrend line since the dip from the highs of $4.10 in August 2025.

And that downtrend currently sees bulls eye a short-term flip to above $1.

Technical indicators, including the rising RSI around 45 and MACD showing bullish divergence, suggest room for momentum.

Also notable is the fact that RAY currently trades near the resistance line of the aforementioned descending trendline.

The retest of this area amid a rise in volume aligns with a potential upward continuation.

However, bulls need to breach immediate resistance at the $0.83 to $0.91 zone.

If this area flips from the key supply wall to support, a potential breakout is likely to propel RAY to highs of $1.27 and then bring new bullish targets into view.

If not, rejection at $0.75-$0.83 could open the door for bears to target the $0.55-$0.50 zone.

Spot Ethereum ETFs see four straight weeks of outflows as price and sentiment slide.

Quantum computing is often framed as a distant storm on the horizon, and not yet relevant to today’s cryptographic systems. In 2026, that framing is dangerously misguided. The Ethereum Foundation’s recent decision to launch a dedicated Post-Quantum (PQ) cryptography team, backed by $2 million in funding, is a watershed moment for the industry. The world’s most influential smart contract ecosystem is no longer treating quantum risk as theoretical; it is acting on the correct assumption that cryptographic disruption could arrive far sooner than expected. 

The quantum threat is already a present market risk, not a future technical problem, and crypto’s failure to treat it as such will define the next systemic crisis. Some readers may find this view overly alarmist or argue that highlighting quantum risk could undermine confidence in digital assets. Others may object that this perspective challenges long-held assumptions about Bitcoin’s resilience and the pace of technological change. However, these contentions radically underestimate how close we are to a cryptographic collapse.

From theory to strategic priority

It’s important to note that quantum computing is no longer confined to academic research. Nation-states, defense agencies, and major technology companies are racing to build machines capable of solving problems classical computers can’t. The risk is not merely computational speed but the potential collapse of cryptographic trust itself.

This urgency is now reflected in some landmark policy developments. The European Commission and EU Member States recently released a coordinated roadmap to transition the bloc’s digital infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography. It stipulates that by 2026, all Member States must begin national PQC strategies; by 2030, critical infrastructure must adopt quantum-resistant encryption; and by 2035, the transition should be completed across all feasible systems. 

The Ethereum Foundation’s decision to allocate funding and talent toward post-quantum research mirrors this new reality.

The dangerous comfort of long timelines

Despite these developments, some industry voices continue to downplay the risk. Bitcoin (BTC) pioneer Adam Back has argued that Bitcoin faces no meaningful quantum threat for 20 to 40 years. This position rests on the assumption that danger only begins when a quantum computer can break cryptographic keys in real time.

The threat does not start when quantum machines arrive at full strength; it starts when attackers can harvest public keys today and wait. Deloitte recently reported that roughly four million Bitcoin, around 25% of all usable supply, sit in addresses that expose public keys vulnerable to quantum attacks. Once a sufficiently advanced quantum computer exists, those wallets could be drained almost instantly using Shor’s algorithm. 

The damage would not unfold gradually. It would be sudden, asymmetric, and irreversible.

Why upgrading is not a simple fix

Supporters of the long-horizon view argue that Bitcoin and other blockchains can simply adopt the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s post-quantum cryptography standards when the time comes. But cryptographic migration is a protocol-level transformation, not a routine patch.

Researchers estimate that upgrading Bitcoin to a quantum-resistant cryptosystem could require up to 75 days of downtime, or over 300 days if the network must operate at reduced capacity to limit attack vectors during migration. For a trillion-dollar asset class, such a disruption would ripple through exchanges, derivatives markets, ETFs, institutional custody systems, and payment rails. This is a risk the market is not currently pricing in.

Blockchains are not alone in this exposure, as the global banking and payments infrastructure relies on the same cryptographic standards now considered vulnerable. A quantum breach would compromise not just assets, but identity systems, digital signatures, interbank settlements, and automated clearing mechanisms.

In practical terms, this could mean frozen payment rails, invalidated digital contracts, and emergency shutdowns of financial networks. The shock would move beyond crypto into equity markets, foreign exchange, and sovereign debt, creating a systemic crisis rooted in broken trust.

When AI and quantum outpace governance

This risk is amplified by the ongoing proliferation of AI, which is accelerating discovery, automation, and exploitation. When paired with quantum computing, it creates a scenario in which machine-scale attacks outpace human governance and regulatory response. Laws move in years. Algorithms move in milliseconds, and the gap is widening continuously. Decentralized systems were designed to remove single points of failure, yet cryptographic fragility threatens to reintroduce them at the foundation layer.

If cryptographic assumptions change, valuations will follow, and capital will increasingly favor quantum-resilient infrastructure. Risk premiums on legacy chains will widen, and regulators will increasingly demand transparency around cryptographic readiness, and institutional investors will expect quantum-risk disclosures. The Ethereum Foundation’s decision is an early signal that the markets will not ignore for long.

Building a swap DApp is relatively straightforward. Running it under real market conditions — with bots, arbitrageurs, and volatile liquidity — is not. BeInCrypto sat down with Andrey Fedorov, CMO & CBDO at STON.fi Dev at Consensus Hong Kong to hear what that process actually looked like.

STON.fi launched as an AMM (automated market maker) on TON Blockchain — a swap interface with liquidity pools. Omniston, its liquidity aggregation protocol, came later as a response to fragmentation: multiple DEXs on TON meant users had to manually compare prices across protocols. Omniston was supposed to fix that by aggregating liquidity into a single access point.

Aggregation worked. But scale exposed new constraints.

Three Lessons From Production

Fedorov is candid about what went wrong early on. “First there was just one token, and it was very easy to provide the technology. Activity levels were minimal, and the user base was still small. But over time it exploded.”

The first lesson was scaling. Both the front end and back end buckled under unexpected demand. The second was subtler: multi-hop swaps — routing trades through intermediate tokens — worked in testing but revealed edge cases under live conditions. “In theory, both hops execute seamlessly,” Fedorov explains. “In practice, you have simultaneous transactions, liquidity shifting across pools, and multiple DEXs updating state at once. The first hop can succeed while the second fails.”

The third lesson was about complexity itself. The initial model assumed a simple set of actors: users swap, liquidity providers provide. Reality added arbitrageurs, bots, and more complex interaction patterns that hadn’t yet been fully anticipated. “I don’t think it is actually possible to work out all these things in the beginning. You need to launch it, see how it goes, then fix something if it breaks.”

STON.fi now accounts for 80 to 90 percent of DEX activity on TON, underscoring its dominant share of swap volume on the chain. But cross-chain swaps, next on the roadmap, will reset that counter. “The fundamentals will be the same, but I’m sure we will see new challenges.”

Why Aggregation Wasn’t Enough

Omniston’s original proposition was to connect all TON DEX pools and find the best route. But aggregating public liquidity has a ceiling. If nobody has added liquidity to a particular pair, no amount of smart routing helps.

“Sometimes people just don’t want to provide liquidity in a specific pool,” Fedorov says. “When a user wants to swap a token in this pool, they can’t get a good price because there is no liquidity.”

The answer was escrow swaps — a parallel execution path that taps into private liquidity from professional market makers, or “resolvers.” Instead of relying solely on AMM pools, Omniston now evaluates both public and private sources and routes each swap through whichever delivers the better outcome.

“It’s not a silver bullet, because we need to have both. The combination provides the best experience.”

Tokenized Equities as a Stress Test

The escrow model proved its value when STON.fi integrated xStocks — tokenized representations of US equities issued by Backed Finance. These are technically TON jettons, but they behave differently from crypto-native tokens in ways that matter for execution.

The harder challenge was liquidity: unlike established crypto pairs, xStocks don’t yet have deep AMM pools across pairs. Technically, AMM support is there. But we also introduced an additional execution path — escrow swaps — so users can access deeper liquidity. Today, most xStocks volume executes through escrow.

From the user’s perspective, Fedorov insists the experience should feel identical to any other swap. “We want our users to forget about technical complexity. Under the hood it is different, but users don’t see it.”

The Self-Custody Trade-off

Fedorov is direct about the constraints of remaining fully non-custodial. 

“Sometimes we see solutions with strong traction — big user bases, high volume. From a business standpoint, integrating them would boost our growth immediately. But many of them are centralized. When I bring those options to our technical team, the answer is simple: it doesn’t work like that.” STON.fi is non-custodial. Users keep their assets in their wallets. Swaps are executed by smart contracts.

Centralized integrations are faster and simpler — often just an API connection. DeFi integrations require trustless, contract-level logic where assets never leave the user’s wallet. “We could grow faster if we compromised on custody. But then we wouldn’t be building DeFi infrastructure — we’d be building another fintech layer.”

The trade-off isn’t only technical. It’s educational. Sometimes this creates a marketing and communication challenge. Self-custody shifts responsibility to the user — something many newcomers underestimate. “If someone loses their seed phrase, we can’t restore access. We don’t have it. We’ve never had it. But quite often users still come to us expecting support, like they would from a bank or centralized exchange.”

In centralized systems, there’s a safety net — password reset, account recovery, customer service with override power. In DeFi, security comes from not having that backdoor. The same mechanism that protects users also removes our ability to intervene.

For STON.fi, that means investing more in onboarding, education, and clearer UX — without diluting the core principle of self-custody.

“It’s a long-term bet. In the short term, education is harder. But in the long term, users understand the value of ownership. Especially in Web3, that’s the point.”

Distribution First, Then Depth

Fedorov frames TON not only as a blockchain choice but also as a distribution strategy because of its integration with Telegram. STON.fi and Omniston integrate with wallets, apps, games, and bots across the Telegram ecosystem — each one a potential swap surface. “They want to use the protocol because they want to enable swaps in their applications. But it is also our distribution network. It’s a win-win.”

The next phase is cross-chain aggregation — starting with Tron, then expanding to EVM chains — to unify liquidity across ecosystems rather than just across DEXs on a single chain.

“Make things easier for those who don’t want to think about technical stuff. Get wider distribution by integrating into all the apps. And aggregate liquidity from multiple blockchains, not just one,” Fedorov says. “That’s the roadmap. Now it’s about scaling it.”