Regulatory fragmentation is now almost as big a barrier to cross-border expansion as regulatory uncertainty (26.7% vs 30%), per our State of Digital Money 2026 survey. Most respondents say 10–20% of their compliance spend is duplicative. Full report:

How do fragmentation, AI and incentives affect liquidity in crypto? Notes from our Partner @Lingersj, during her panel at @Cointelegraph CONNECT with @ShiliangTang @ataaffe @_MinTeo @raycotarrida. Fragmentation has always existed in crypto, and RWAs are no different. Tokenized versions of the same underlying aren’t fungible across issuers. Liquidity has improved over the years, but there’s still a long way to go. AI has shortened research, analysis and backtesting cycles. It could act like an “agentic AMM” for individuals and help reduce fragmentation, but it’s still too early to let AI run this on its own. The flip side is security risks due to AI. Teams have to treat security as a continuous process, not a one-and-done. Strong SOPs across both code and human points of failure are essential. Incentives are a good way to bootstrap liquidity early, but not a long-term solution. Good fundamentals and transparency with the community are key.

Europe must reduce fragmentation to unlock economic growth, Eurogroup President Kyriakos @Pierrakakis tells our Supervision Newsletter. The latest edition also covers investment banking, on-site inspection reforms and our clean-up of supervisory measures

3 root causes of "The AI Fragmentation Tax" 1) Visibility is fragmented: About half of companies don't track LLM API costs at all, even when AI is core to the product. 2) Forecasting is broken: Only 15% of companies can predict AI spend within ±10% accuracy, which makes budgeting and margin protection nearly impossible. 3) Infrastructure is sprawling: Agents, MCP servers, LLMs, APIs, and event streams all connect across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments. Every touchpoint generates cost that's invisible in isolation but huge in aggregate. Even companies not integrating AI into their product directly are still heavy consumers of third-party LLMs, so they add cost with no measured revenue to offset it. The fragmentation tax compounds the longer it exists. Every release cycle makes it worse if you don't address the 3 root causes. That's why we're obsessed with building a unified cost governance layer for our customers. As AI speeds up the convergence of many capabilities, margin discipline becomes a differentiator.

Instead of patching Layer 2 fragmentation with theoretical economic zones, true scalability requires a fundamentally unified architecture. Yellow bypasses this dilemma entirely by delivering a chain-agnostic settlement layer powered by state channels for seamless, unfragmented liquidity.

🇸🇬 CONNECT: Could AI solve crypto's liquidity fragmentation problem? @DWFLabs' @Lingersj sees AI-powered market makers connecting fragmented trading venues by monitoring more markets than human traders can. She believes AI could help improve liquidity across the industry.

The International Monetary Fund released a report about geoeconomic fragmentation. Following the outbreak of the Russian war on #Ukraine#, #ColdWarTwo# risks are rising - and it presents risks to the global #economy#. #supplychain#, and financial #markets#.