Opinion by: Koshiek Karan, founder of BankerX
A seismic shift is underway: suits are giving way to smart contracts, trading floors to token pools and bankers to builders.
Just as the internet democratized access to information, blockchain is set to decentralize ownership and redistribute financial power.
Wall Street is passing the torch to Web3.
This isn’t evolution; it’s a full-scale re-architecture of the global financial system.
Money never sleeps
Stock markets have existed for over 400 years. Smoke-filled coffee houses in Amsterdam evolved into handshake deals in New York. Handshake deals quickly formalized into paper contracts. Those paper contracts traded fiercely in open outcry pits as Wall Street boomed. Shouting traders disappeared into a melting frenzy of technology and electronic trading.
The new era of decentralization is a natural progression in the timeline of inevitable disruption.
The crypto market never closes, yet the stock market does. Restricted trading hours stack the deck against retail investors. The US stock market runs from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm (6.5 hours of trading). Yet institutions enjoy the luxury of accessing the market for 13.5 hours daily (4:00 am to 8:00 pm).
The appetite for inclusive market access is ravenous. Robinhood introduced extended trading hours in June 2023. Users benefit from an extra 6.5 hours of trading. After-hours trading volumes have doubled since the launch. Still, this isn’t bulletproof. Trades aren’t processed in real-time. Orders are queued for execution at the next session’s open.
Stranger things
Fixed trading hours spawn strange distortions. Case in point: the “night effect.” This strategy involves buying US stocks at the market close (4:00 pm New York time) and selling them when the market opens (9:30 am). Over the past 30 years, this simple move would have delivered a staggering 1,100% return.
Now reverse the trade — buy at the open and sell at the close — and cumulative returns drop to under 100%.
Why? Plenty happens overnight. Companies release earnings results after the bell. Breaking macroeconomic news and global developments filter into asset prices. Retail investors are locked out of reacting — frozen on the sidelines while institutional capital moves the market.
The result? Traders are rewarded for taking on overnight risk.
Institutions benefit from exclusive access to financial markets. They don’t play by “regular market hours” rules. But that edge evaporates in a world without “overnight,” where tokenized and crypto-native markets trade fluidly 24/7.
Markets are supposed to be fair, but fixed hours, layered access and legacy infrastructure say otherwise.
Technically, global markets never close. Across Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US, at least one major stock exchange is open.
Money never sleeps.
Wall Street after dark
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced plans to extend trading hours to 22 hours on weekdays to satisfy the global demand for US equities. The NYSE is seeking approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch.
The tech-focused Nasdaq exchange is also moving quickly. The exchange is planning 24-hour trading on weekdays.
Related: ‘Stablecoin summer’ as Coinbase, Circle stocks surge on new legislation
Global demand is clear. Over 56 products tracking the Nasdaq-100 were launched within five years — 98% of these products were introduced outside of the United States.
The response from traditional stock exchanges is clear: Either embrace or become a victim of disruption.
Tokenization is democratization
Naturally, there are some dissenting voices on Wall Street against fluid, always-on markets. The resistance stems from the way traditional markets are structured. You have multiple layers of compliance, trade approvals and (self-inflicted) bureaucracy. This means you need more people to handle more paperwork.
It’s much less of an issue when you consider that algorithms, not humans, drive up to 80% of trading volumes.
Crypto has an elegant solution: tokenized equity. Real-world stocks and ETFs are traded on the blockchain 24/7 and globally accessible to anyone, anywhere. This represents the apex of efficient markets, where prices react in real time to news events — a hyper-efficient market stripped of asymmetric information.
Kraken recently announced it will be offering tokenized stocks to its non-US clients. Tokens will be stored on the Solana blockchain and backed 1:1 by actual shares. The upside? Faster settlements, lower fees and global accessibility.
Tokenized equity is the entry point to a DeFi takeover. Tokenized equity can be easily integrated into decentralized applications (DApps) to revolutionize yield-bearing collateral and lending altogether. Simply put, it’s a disruptive ticket to borderless, permissionless markets.
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with roughly $11.6 trillion in assets under management, and its CEO, Larry Fink, had this to say about the future of finance in his annual chairman’s letter to investors this year:
“Tokenization is democratization. Every stock, every bond, every fund—every asset—can be tokenized. If they are, it will revolutionize investing. Markets wouldn’t need to close. Transactions that currently take days would clear in seconds. And billions of dollars currently immobilized by settlement delays could be reinvested immediately back into the economy, generating more growth.”
Four centuries ago, stock markets were founded by communities who created a system anchored on inclusion and pooling of resources and driven by opportunity — a shared promise of prosperity and wealth creation. Crypto’s new upgrade reaffirms these values.
Massive liquidity injections, frictionless market access and cross-border communities scale the ecosystem in unimaginable ways. A market unified through decentralization. This is the inflection point — the beginning of singularity in global capital markets.
We’re still early.
Opinion by: Koshiek Karan, founder of BankerX.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
