Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: NYSE Enters 24/7 Trading: This Is Not Crypto's Victory, But the Infinite Expansion of 'Tradability'
The world is becoming an exchange that never closes.
On January 19, the New York Stock Exchange announced the development of a tokenized securities platform. 24/7 trading of U.S. stocks and ETFs, stablecoin deposits, instant settlement, and order placement by dollar amount. Partners include Bank of New York Mellon and Citigroup—both old money.
The plan is still awaiting regulatory approval. But the direction is set.
NYSE President Lynn Martin said:
"For over two hundred years, we have been changing how markets operate. We are leading the industry toward a fully on-chain solution."
Call it leading, but it's actually catching up.
Last week, the CEO of ICE, NYSE's parent company, said: "We are catching up to Robinhood."
ICE is a market cap of over $100 billion. Robinhood is an internet brokerage founded in 2013.
And who is Robinhood chasing?
In June last year, Robinhood launched tokenized stocks in the EU, based on the Arbitrum chain, 24-hour trading, settled with stablecoins. Their CEO said: "Once you experience a 24/7 market, you can't go back."
The old hierarchy was: Wall Street looked down on internet brokerages, internet brokerages looked down on crypto exchanges. Now the NYSE is learning Robinhood's tricks, and Robinhood is using the infrastructure of the crypto world.
Mutual integration, role reversal, everything becomes tradable, no one looks down on anyone.
This time, the NYSE is breaking down three walls.
The first is time.
U.S. stocks used to close at 4 PM; the NYSE, by law, had to shut its doors. The problem is, the Earth is round. When New York sleeps, Tokyo is awake. Global investors all want to buy U.S. stocks—why should the market follow New York's schedule?
Last year, someone raised a concern: What if a Tesla factory explodes over the weekend? Nasdaq is closed, but tokenized Tesla on the chain can still be bought and sold. The price oracle stops updating Friday afternoon and doesn't resume until Monday morning. For 48 hours in between, everyone is dealing with a "ghost price"—a price disconnected from the real world.
This was seen as a flaw of tokenization. The NYSE's response now is: If I just stay open 24/7, isn't that problem solved?
Then there's space.
Previously, an Indonesian wanting to buy U.S. stocks had to open a U.S. brokerage account, exchange currency, wait for T+1 settlement, and go through a bunch of compliance procedures. Now, with stablecoin deposits, theoretically, you can just use USDT to buy directly.
The CEO of ICE, NYSE's parent company, said something very telling last week: Stablecoins are "dollarizing" the world.
Previously, dollar hegemony relied on oil settlement and the SWIFT system. Now there's an additional on-chain path. ICE is already working with Bank of New York Mellon and Citigroup on "tokenized deposits," allowing institutions to transfer funds after banks close, move capital across time zones, and cover margins in the middle of the night. The constraints of time zones on finance are diminishing.
Finally, the threshold. The NYSE's mention of "order placement by dollar amount" means you can buy 0.001 shares. Previously, one share of Berkshire Hathaway cost over $700,000; now, theoretically, you can own a tiny fraction for $1.
The market for tokenized stocks is still small. Data from RWA.xyz showed a global market cap of around $340 million at the end of last year, but it multiplied several times over the year. Kraken, Bybit, and Robinhood all rushed to launch such products last year.
The NYSE is the latest to enter. And it carries the most weight.
But if this is interpreted as crypto finally breaking through and winning, that's a bit of self-congratulation.
24/7 trading, stablecoin settlement, on-chain clearing, fractional ownership... these are all things the crypto world has been tinkering with for the past decade. But we ourselves failed to build any large-scale applications with this infrastructure; to this day, we're still arguing about meme coin pumps and airdrop farming.
Now Wall Street is taking this entire infrastructure and using it to trade Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. It's a bit like the dot-com bubble: after the carnage, the survivors were Amazon and Google.
The bubble burst, but the infrastructure remained, just with a different group of people making money on it.
Actually, I think what's truly expanding is not cryptocurrency, but "tradability" itself.
During last year's U.S. election, trading volume on Polymarket for prediction markets broke $100 million in a single day. A prediction market turned "who becomes president" into a tradable contract.
In New York, someone tokenized a Manhattan building and sold tokens; for a few hundred dollars, you could own one ten-thousandth of a building, making or losing money with the property's value. Others monitor Domino's Pizza order volume near the Pentagon; a sudden spike might mean the Defense Department is working overnight, something big might be happening—this too can become a trading signal.
The wall of time is down. The wall of space is down. The wall of threshold is down. Anything can become a tradable thing.
The NYSE's move today is just another step in this direction.
Nasdaq filed a similar application last September. The Depository Trust Company (DTC) received SEC approval in December and expects to launch in the second half of this year. With today's announcement, the NYSE has actually jumped ahead in progress.
Really, everyone is competing for the same thing: to make trading never stop.
The Earth doesn't sleep, so why should the market?
Twitter:https://twitter.com/BitpushNewsCN
Bitpush TG Discussion Group:https://t.me/BitPushCommunity
Bitpush TG Subscription: https://t.me/bitpush
