How Will Tokenized Stocks Actually Trade 24/7?

The Promise and the Problem

Traditional stock markets operate within fixed windows. The NYSE opens at 9:30am and closes at 4pm Eastern, Monday through Friday. Outside those hours: no price discovery, no liquidity, no settlement. If something moves markets on a Saturday — a geopolitical crisis, an earnings leak, a presidential tweet — investors can't do anything about it until Monday morning.

Tokenized stocks promise to change that. Put equity on a blockchain, and in theory, it can trade 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But there's a catch that rarely gets discussed in the headlines: the underlying asset still only trades during market hours. If Apple stock exists on a blockchain as a token, what happens when someone wants to trade it at 2am on a Sunday?

The answer depends on what kind of tokenized stock you're actually holding. Not all "24/7 trading" is created equal. Some models give you real-time settlement of actual shares. Others are essentially IOUs that reconcile when traditional markets reopen. The differences matter — especially for institutional investors managing fiduciary obligations.

Why Everyone Wants This

The demand is real and coming from multiple directions. Rob Hadick, a GP at Dragonfly, explained the institutional pull on Tokenized Episode 76, recorded live at Digital Asset Summit:

"We do want to enable trading that's over the weekend, overnight. Right now you have a lot of market makers willing to 'dirty hedge' overnight — you move with the sun and find some sort of exposure that's close enough. But it's really hard to hedge exposure well enough over a weekend. If you're going to manage collateral, if you're going to do any sort of leverage over that period of time, you're going to have to be able to do it on on-chain rails."

It's not just about convenience. Weekend trading gaps create real risk management problems for market makers, prime brokers, and anyone running leveraged positions. Collateral calls don't wait for the NYSE to open.

Noah Levine, a partner at a16z, offered a different angle on the same episode. He argued that 24/7 trading is less about clock-watching and more about what happens when your primary financial account lives in a stablecoin wallet:

"The bigger opportunity for these tokenized assets is a lot less the 24/7 nature of it. It's really more: if I'm holding my primary balance in a stablecoin wallet, I want to do other things, not just look at my balance or make payments."

In other words, if hundreds of millions of people already hold digital dollars, the next question is what they can invest those dollars in — without leaving the on-chain environment.

Four Models for 24/7 Tokenized Stocks

Four distinct infrastructure models have emerged, each with different trade-offs around regulation, liquidity, settlement, and investor protection.

Model 1: Direct On-Chain Issuance

A company issues shares directly on a blockchain. No traditional stock certificate, no DTCC, no NASDAQ listing. The shares are native blockchain assets from the start.

Trading happens peer-to-peer or via on-chain order books, 24/7. Settlement is instant — blockchain finality equals ownership transfer. Dividends, voting, and buybacks can be automated through smart contracts.

This is what Figure Markets and Superstate are building. Figure issued a separate class of its own shares that trade on-chain through its ATS (alternative trading system), with market-making that bridges between traditional and blockchain rails. Superstate is issuing fully on-chain equity certificates where the stock itself lives natively on a blockchain.

Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, described why this model is powerful on Episode 77:

"They're taking on the hardest problem to get to the best product, which is a fully direct on-chain equity. They issued a separate class of shares, and they market-make and take it back and forth from tradfi to blockchain."

The catch: regulatory approval for public companies to issue shares directly on-chain doesn't exist yet in the US. Liquidity is thin when you have a small number of tokenholders rather than millions of daily trades. And the SEC hasn't green-lit native on-chain equity for public companies. For now, direct issuance works best for private companies, SPVs, and pre-IPO equity.

Model 2: Tokenized Wrappers (Custodied Shares)

Traditional shares — Apple, Tesla, Microsoft — are held in custody by a regulated entity. A blockchain token represents an ownership claim on those custodied shares. This is the most common model for public equities today.

Tokens trade 24/7 on-chain. But final settlement only happens when traditional markets are open. During off-hours, trades are provisional: the token changes hands on the blockchain, but the underlying share doesn't move until markets reopen and the custodian reconciles with the traditional settlement system.

Backed (tokenized stocks on Polygon, custodied by licensed Swiss entities), INX, and Archax (FCA-regulated in the UK) all use variants of this model. You can trade 24/7, but you need to understand the distinction between on-chain token transfer and underlying share settlement.

Eric Piscini, CEO of Hashgraph, flagged the trust question on Episode 47:

"Are there real stocks that you are actually owning? Because what Robinhood did, if I'm not mistaken, is an SPV. So it's actually not the stock that you own. People have to be careful when they invest in those things — for example, if you had a dividend associated with that stock, you have no guarantee that dividend is coming to you."

The key distinction: you can trade 24/7, but final settlement of the underlying share still happens during market hours.

Model 3: Synthetic / Derivative Tokens

A blockchain token tracks the price of a stock, but you don't own the actual share. It's essentially a contract for difference (CFD) or perpetual future. The issuer holds collateral — stablecoins or cash — and pays out based on price movements.

Tokens trade 24/7 because they're not tied to the actual stock, only its price. Price feeds come from oracles (Chainlink, Pyth) that track traditional market data. When markets are closed, some platforms use last-known prices or predictive models.

Robinhood's stock token announcement at Cannes in 2025 fell into this category. Simon Taylor explained on Episode 38:

"My understanding of this is they've created a perpetual future derivative. It's a derivative product that derives its value from the underlying asset. These could be public equities or private market shares — hence OpenAI tweeting that they have not authorized the sale of these shares. But if it's a derivative, you don't have to."

Synthetix and the now-defunct Mirror Protocol used similar models. FTX offered tokenized stocks before its collapse.

The advantage is genuine 24/7 trading without custody complexity. The risks are significant: counterparty exposure if the issuer becomes insolvent, no voting rights or dividend entitlements, potential price divergence during low-liquidity off-hours, and regulatory risk. FTX's collapse and subsequent regulatory action largely killed the credibility of unregulated synthetic stock tokens.

Model 4: Hybrid (On-Chain Trading + Traditional Clearing)

A blockchain-based trading venue operates 24/7, but a traditional clearing house or central counterparty (CCP) guarantees settlement when markets reopen. Trades execute on-chain instantly. The CCP acts as buyer to every seller and seller to every buyer — the same model that CME, ICE, and DTCC use in traditional markets.

Both NYSE and NASDAQ have started exploring this approach. Hadick described the landscape on Episode 76:

"NYC and NASDAQ have started to talk about ways to do that. In this case, they're talking about a potentially segregated order book that's a completely different exchange that uses a specific transfer agent. NASDAQ has talked about doing something consolidated, where you have both tokenized and non-tokenized assets that can be treated against each other and are functionally equivalent."

DTCC's Project Ion, Boerse Stuttgart Digital in Germany, and tZERO have all experimented with blockchain order books backed by traditional settlement infrastructure.

This model is the most likely to scale for public equities because it combines blockchain efficiency with the regulatory and credit-risk frameworks that institutional investors already trust. The downside: it's not fully decentralised, it requires broker-dealer licences and clearing member agreements, and traditional finance moves slowly.

Liquidity: The Real Bottleneck

Technology isn't the constraint. Liquidity is.

Apple trades over 50 million shares per day on NASDAQ. A tokenized version with 10,000 holders can't come close to replicating that depth. And 24/7 trading only works if there's someone on the other side of the trade at 3am on a Sunday.

Chris Harmse, co-founder of BVNK, spoke to this from personal experience on Episode 47:

"This one's really close to my heart. I'm originally South African, and South Africa's got exchange controls. It's actually quite difficult as a South African to access US domestic stocks. To just have access to US tech stocks in my crypto wallet, in a decentralised way — that's super exciting."

The excitement is real. But liquidity has a chicken-and-egg problem: traders want 24/7 access only if there's liquidity; liquidity providers want volume only if traders show up; and institutions wait for regulatory clarity before committing capital.

Current solutions being tested include dedicated crypto market makers (Jump, Wintermute, GSR), automated market makers (Uniswap-style pools for tokenized assets), and cross-chain liquidity aggregation. But for now, private equity and tokenized money market funds have decent on-chain liquidity. Public equities remain experimental.

Joao Reginatto, CSO of M0, captured the likely trajectory on Episode 38:

"I think first you go towards fragmentation, because the barrier for entry is so low. And then technologically, we will evolve into things that are better and with higher levels of interoperability — in the same way that I think it's happening with stablecoins."

What Regulators Are Watching

If a stock trades 24/7 on a blockchain but the underlying market is closed, regulators want to know: is that fair to retail investors?

The SEC hasn't approved 24/7 public equity trading. Their concerns include price manipulation during low-liquidity off-hours, the absence of circuit breakers (traditional markets halt trading during crashes), and settlement risk if off-hours trades fail when markets reopen.

In Europe, MiCA regulates crypto assets, but tokenized securities still fall under existing securities law (MiFID II). Some EU countries — Germany and Switzerland in particular — have been more permissive with digital securities regulation.

The UK's FCA-regulated Archax tokenized a BlackRock money market fund, proving that regulated tokenized securities are possible within existing frameworks. Singapore's MAS has licensed digital exchanges for private securities, though public equities remain restricted.

Cuy Sheffield put the regulatory question in practical terms on Episode 76:

"I think I've said this every show for a while: it is a great thing for society if more people own assets. And I also think that over time, the amount of working capital that you need is going to decrease as it becomes easier to convert between assets and cash."

The vision is clear: a world where any asset in your portfolio — stocks, bonds, treasuries, Bitcoin — can be used as collateral, traded, or converted to cash instantly, 24/7. Getting there requires both regulatory frameworks and market infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

What This Means for Different Participants

For retail investors: Check what you're actually buying. Native on-chain shares (rare, mostly private companies) are fundamentally different from custodied wrappers (real ownership, delayed off-hours settlement) and synthetic derivatives (no ownership, counterparty risk). A 24/7 market with zero liquidity is worse than a 6.5-hour market with deep liquidity.

For institutions: Private equity and real-world assets are already using tokenization for around-the-clock settlement. Public equities are 3–5 years away from institutional-scale 24/7 trading. Watch DTCC's Project Ion and the NYSE/NASDAQ tokenization pilots closely — if traditional settlement infrastructure moves on-chain, the rest follows.

For companies: Direct issuance (Model 1) makes sense for private companies raising capital — cheaper than an IPO, with a global investor base. Public companies will wait for regulatory clarity before tokenizing their shares. Figure's approach of issuing a separate on-chain share class while maintaining traditional shares is the model to watch.

Where This Lands

Tokenized stocks trading 24/7 is possible today. The technology works. The regulatory frameworks are forming. But four different infrastructure models exist because no one has solved the full puzzle — the combination of real ownership, deep liquidity, regulatory compliance, and genuine 24/7 settlement across public equities.

Private markets are ahead. Stablecoins showed that the right form factor can bring trillions in value on-chain within a few years. If tokenized stocks follow the same adoption curve — fragmented first, then standardised, then mainstream — we could see institutional-scale 24/7 equity trading within this decade.

The model most likely to win for public equities is the hybrid: blockchain-based order matching with traditional clearing infrastructure behind it. Not because it's the purest vision of on-chain finance, but because it gives institutions what they need — speed, compliance, and credit-risk management — without requiring them to abandon the regulatory frameworks they already trust.