News about Nasdaq advancing the tokenization of U.S. stock securities has been making headlines again these days. Many people's first reaction is: Will U.S. stocks then be tradable 24 hours a day? Can they be transferred anytime like coins? It sounds trendy, but such discussions often only scratch the surface.

After reading all the documents, the first question that came to my mind was—everyone is staring at the fact that "stocks are becoming tokens," but what really needs to be asked is: Is the U.S. capital market quietly rewriting its underlying operating system?

You might think this is an exaggeration, but think back to the GameStop frenzy in 2021: Robinhood was required by clearing institutions to increase margin, forced to restrict purchases, not because the price was too crazy, but because the "T+2 settlement system was too slow." If assets could be settled in real-time back then, Robinhood might not have needed to "melt down and shut down." That wasn't a technical issue but an era gap in infrastructure.

The essence of Nasdaq's proposal this time is to fill this gap.

Nasdaq is not doing conceptual marketing but performing a "quiet major surgery" on financial infrastructure

Over the past few years, the crypto circle's "on-chain U.S. stocks" and "shadow stocks" actually bypassed the real securities system, mostly being overseas brokers packaging or crypto platforms issuing themselves. Essentially, they had nothing to do with Nasdaq and didn't change the traditional framework.

But this time, Nasdaq is actually planning to replace the "off-chain clearing system" with on-chain intelligent clearing—the weight of this matter is completely different.

You can imagine it like this: the trading interface, matching system, and order logic remain almost unchanged, so retail investors hardly feel any difference. But the clearing process will change from "manual accounting days later" to "directly writing into the on-chain ledger after trade execution," with custody, registration, and settlement all automated.

Why is this important? Because the securities clearing process over the past few decades has been like an old, creaky machine. A simple fact: until last year, U.S. Treasuries changed from T+2 to T+1, which was already seen as a "great leap forward" in the industry.

A more typical example is the aftermath of the FTX collapse: regulators found that many assets couldn't be accounted for in real-time because there were too many custodians, sub-custodians, and third-party clearing merchants, each holding part of the information. The longer the chain, the weaker the risk control.

On-chain clearing precisely targets these deepest structural issues.

So what Nasdaq is doing is not "making stocks more Web3" but "making the U.S. financial system no longer resemble telephone lines from the 1970s." When you realize the traditional system is actively migrating to the chain due to aging, you'll understand: this isn't Crypto revolutionizing Wall Street; it's Wall Street becoming more like Crypto because of real needs.

Once settlement is on-chain, the power structure of the financial industry will be completely rewritten

Many people don't realize that clearing and custody are the most profitable yet hidden businesses in the financial system. For example, DTC earns tens of billions of dollars annually just from "securities custody fees," a model that has hardly changed in decades.

If Nasdaq moves registration and custody onto the chain, it means the role of custodian will be significantly weakened. Not because they are unimportant, but because the trustworthiness of the ledger itself replaces them.

Another deep impact of real-time on-chain settlement is: intermediaries are losing the time差. In the past, brokers' cross-market arbitrage and institutions' T+2 fund scheduling essentially exploited the space created by "delay." If on-chain settlement is instant, auditable, and programmable, such opportunities may systematically disappear.

Don't forget, Hong Kong's issuance of that on-chain green bond last year reduced settlement time from the industry standard of five days to one second. This caused huge震动 within the industry because it proved that "on-chain bonds are not a concept but mature and operational infrastructure."

And when stocks can operate this way, the form of securities as an asset class itself will gradually change from "static certificates" to "dynamic financial events." Assets being programmable, divisible, and composable—traits that only existed in DeFi—will slowly渗透 into traditional markets.

What is truly changing is not the chain, but finance itself.

Resistance will certainly be great, but the direction may already be irreversible

Resistance certainly exists. Whether on-chain registration has legal effect, whether on-chain custody is equivalent to regulated custody, whether intermediary institutions will oppose automated clearing, whether RWA protocols worry about being "cut off" by infrastructure players—these are not technical issues but赤裸裸的利益冲突. But history has repeatedly proven that infrastructure upgrades never rely on everyone reaching consensus but are pushed forward by the needs of the times. Just like no one主动 wanted to discard fax machines, but the internet eventually naturally phased them out. Nasdaq taking this step means this is not a marginal experiment but a central evolution; once started, the direction is hard to pull back. What truly decides the next decade won't be which token multiplied in price, but whether the underlying asset architecture is quietly being replaced. When stocks can go on-chain, bonds, funds, and options will naturally follow suit. Assets will no longer be static records in accounts but will operate in real-time like code. By the time you truly realize the change, it might already be one day when you discover—the entire financial world has quietly changed its operating system. This might be the real inflection point of the asset world: not a price inflection point, but an infrastructure inflection point, and infrastructure changes are always the slowest yet the deepest.

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