Wall Street No Longer Closes at 4 p.m, Today, $500 Million in Tokenized Stocks Continue Trading

Binance launched bStocks on June 11 with five tickers. Seven weeks later: $500 million in assets, more than 46 listings, $2 billion through it in a single weekend. In the week to July 28, Binance Research counted 92% of on-chain bStocks volume printing while US markets were shut.

"Thinking about tokenized stocks trading 24/7, thinking about being able to sit on a Friday afternoon at a traditional long short hedge fund and perhaps selling risk into a weekend market," Nic Roberts-Huntley, CEO of Blueprint Finance, said on the On The Margin podcast, on where digital assets fit inside traditional finance.

That is risk transfer on a day the exchange is shut, "in the form of digital assets in a regulated environment so that a chief compliance officer doesn't call you and tell you to reduce your exposure."

A product the industry files under after-hours access is behaving like the main session for the people using it.

Two sessions, and the bigger one has no bell

"With bStocks accounting for 58% of equity-linked volume on Binance outside US market hours," says Shunyet Jan, Head of Exchange & Trading at Binance, "it is clear that users increasingly expect access on their own terms."

Market hours were an operational necessity for a physical floor, and they survived electronic execution out of habit. An asset settling on a ledger that never closes has no reason to inherit that timetable.

The capital is already elsewhere. Foreign investors hold $19.9 trillion of US equities on the Treasury's June 2025 survey, and macro news does not wait for New York. So is the user base: Binance says 41.5% of bStocks users made their first traditional-market investment through a tokenized security, and 44% of the activity comes from Gen Z.

Both ends of the market are arriving at once. "Now it's a lot more institutional participants are coming on chain," Jonathan Han of Euler Labs said on the On The Margin podcast. "A lot of retail, average day people are coming on chain to find alternative yield sources and opportunities."

"We're seeing more users explore traditional finance through an experience that is borderless, always available, and integrated with the digital assets they already hold," Jan said. "As user demands evolve, we will continue expanding bStocks to make global investment opportunities more accessible and intuitive."

The weekend is doing real price discovery

"The consistency is what stands out," Jan said of Binance Research's weekend data. "Across all 41 cases where Monday's move was larger than three percent, bStocks had already anticipated the direction over the weekend. It shows that even when traditional markets are closed, price discovery can continue."

The numbers behind it: a median 92% of Monday's move captured over the weekend, residual deviation 0.19% at the open, turnover 4 to 21 times faster than the underlying shares per unit of listed supply.

Seven weekends is a thin sample.

"While around-the-clock trading is technologically feasible and may enhance market accessibility and flexibility, its effective implementation and sustainability depend on deep coordination across trading, clearing, settlement, and regulatory systems," said Nandini Sukumar, CEO of the World Federation of Exchanges, whose February research found 24/7 crypto markets run with thinner liquidity, higher volatility and more manipulation risk off-peak. "It will rely on the coordination of financial market infrastructure to overcome the challenges to liquidity timing, counterparty exposure, and cash flow alignment whilst maintaining robust mechanisms for price discovery and investor protection."

Roberts-Huntley puts the same constraint in desk terms. "The cost of execution is really high just because there's not enough activity on chain," he said. "So we need to bleed this liquidity in, create the depth in pools, and start to increase the capabilities for flows to get larger and larger."

Wall Street is rebuilding the same thing

"DTCC's 24x5 clearing is the unlock that makes extended hours trading possible at scale," said Kevin Tyrrell, head of markets at the NYSE, when the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's NSCC went live with weekday round-the-clock clearing on June 29.

The exchange that has set US market hours since 1792 could not run a continuous market until its clearinghouse could.

The timetable:

• Nasdaq: 16 hours to 23, approved April 10, live December 6. Day session 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. ET, night 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.
• NYSE Arca: approved, 23 hours, December 6.
• Cboe EDGX: filed for near 24x5, approval pending.
• The tape: SIPs cleared to extend consolidated feeds, same schedule.

None of which finishes the job, in Sukumar's reading. "Any shift must be ecosystem-wide, coordinated across custodians, settlement banks, brokers, and regulators," she wrote in the WFE's earlier paper on 24/7 markets.

Tokenized venues got there first, with no multi-day clearing cycle to retrofit.

Where the money goes

Binance is private, so the exposure sits a layer out. The constraint on how fast it grows is behavioural as much as technical.

"I think what we've asked a lot of like institutional finance people who sit in their traditional roles and have very, very fixed practices is to say, you must change fundamentally what you do to get exposure to something that is just a fraction of the size of what you have," Roberts-Huntley said. "That doesn't make any sense whatsoever."

• The venues: Nasdaq @NDAQ, NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange @ICE, Cboe Global Markets (CBOE) . All December 6.
• The brokers: (IBKR) , (SCHW) , (HOOD) , quoting overnight already.
• The listing: Circle (CRCL) , one of the five bStocks launch listings, CRCLB/USDT.
• The spread: (VIRT) and the electronic market makers. Wider books overnight.
• Not investable: DTCC, member-owned by the banks and brokers it clears for.

The bottom line

The demand is in the volume. The open question is who runs the overnight session, and whose capital backstops the book at 3 a.m.

Nirup Ramalingam runs BridgePort, which handles off-exchange settlement so institutional desks do not have to park money at every venue they trade. "If you think about institution with millions of dollars, they don't want to deposit assets on every single exchange," he said on the On The Margin podcast. "When they're not trading on any particular exchange, that's dead capital. Dead capital is no ROI basically." The alternative is to leave the assets with a custodian and allocate against them: "You want to optimize your capital by allocating on an exchange or multiple exchanges in milliseconds as the opportunities arise." A market that never shuts makes that arithmetic permanent.

"But I think it has to be a little bit more invisible. I think it has to be a little bit more subtle than perhaps we want it to be, because we all love what we do," Roberts-Huntley said of how crypto lands inside traditional finance. "But I do think it has to be subtle, complementary, and not necessarily disruptive."

On December 6 it stops being a thesis and becomes a session.