In recent days, news about Nasdaq advancing the tokenization of US stock securities has been making headlines again. Many people's first reaction is: will US stocks be able to trade 24 hours a day in the future? Can they be transferred like cryptocurrencies at any time? It sounds indeed trendy, but such discussions often only scratch the surface.

After reading the entire document, the first question that popped into my mind is—everyone is focused on the "stocks becoming tokens," but the real question to ask is: is the US capital market quietly rewriting its underlying operating system?

You might think this is an exaggeration, but consider the scene during the GameStop frenzy in 2021: Robinhood was required by clearinghouses to raise margin and was forced to restrict buying, not because the prices were too crazy, but because "the T+2 settlement system was too slow." If the assets at that time could have been settled in real-time, Robinhood might not have needed to implement a "circuit breaker-style delisting." This is not a technical issue, but a gap in infrastructure.

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

In recent years, the crypto circle's "on-chain US stocks" and "shadow stocks" have actually bypassed the real securities system, mostly packaged by overseas brokers or issued by crypto platforms themselves. Essentially, they have nothing to do with Nasdaq and do not change the traditional structure.

However, Nasdaq's proposal to replace the "off-chain clearing system" with on-chain smart clearing is a completely different matter.

You can think of it this way: the trading interface, matching system, and order logic remain the same, so retail investors will hardly feel any change. But the clearing process will shift from "manual reconciliation days later" to "directly writing into the on-chain ledger after the transaction," with custody, registration, and delivery all completed automatically.

Why is this important? Because the securities clearing process has been like an outdated machine for decades. A simple fact: until last year, US Treasury bonds only changed from T+2 to T+1, which has been regarded as "a major leap for humanity" in the industry.

A more typical example is the aftermath of the FTX collapse: regulators found that many assets could not be reconciled in real-time because there were too many custodians, sub-custodians, and third-party clearinghouses in between, each holding a part of the information. The longer the chain, the weaker the control over risk.

On-chain clearing precisely targets these deep-seated structural issues.

So what Nasdaq is doing is not "making stocks more Web3," but "making the US financial system no longer resemble a 1970s telephone line." When you realize that the traditional system is actively migrating to on-chain due to aging, you will understand: this is not a Crypto revolution on Wall Street, but Wall Street is transforming to resemble Crypto more due to real needs.

Many people do not realize that clearing and custody are the most profitable and also the most hidden businesses in the financial system. For example, DTC earns tens of billions of dollars annually just from "securities custody fees," and this model has hardly changed for decades.

If Nasdaq moves registration and custody on-chain, it means the role of custodians will be significantly weakened. Not because they are unimportant, but because the credibility of the ledger is replaced by the chain itself.

Another deep impact of real-time on-chain settlement is that intermediaries are losing their time advantage. In the past, brokers arbitraging across markets and institutions managing T+2 fund scheduling essentially profited from the "delay" that created opportunities. If on-chain delivery is instantaneous, auditable, and programmable, such opportunities may systematically disappear.

Don't forget that last year, Hong Kong issued that on-chain green bond, reducing the settlement time from the industry standard of five days to just one second. This had a significant impact within the industry because it proved that "on-chain bonds are not just a concept, but a mature and operational infrastructure."

When stocks can operate this way, the nature of the securities asset class itself will gradually shift from "static certificates" to "dynamic financial originals." Assets will become programmable, divisible, and combinable, characteristics that originally existed only in DeFi will slowly permeate traditional markets.

What is truly being changed is not the chain, but finance.

Of course, there are resistances. Whether on-chain registration has legal validity, whether on-chain custody can be equated with regulated custody, whether intermediaries will oppose automated clearing, and whether RWA protocols will worry about being "cut off" by infrastructure players—these are not technical issues, but naked conflicts of interest. However, history has repeatedly proven that infrastructure upgrades are never achieved through consensus but are pushed forward by the demands of the times. Just like no one actively wanted to get rid of fax machines, the internet ultimately phased them out naturally. Nasdaq taking this step means this is not a marginal experiment, but a central evolution; once it begins, the direction is hard to pull back. What will truly determine the next decade is not which token has increased several times, but whether the underlying architecture of assets is quietly changing. When stocks can go on-chain, bonds, funds, and options will naturally follow, and 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 may already be a day when you discover—the entire financial world has quietly changed its operating system. This may be the real turning point in the asset world: not a turning point in price, but a turning point in infrastructure, and changes in infrastructure are always the slowest yet the deepest.

Related: "Another Halving in the Crypto Space": Bittensor's first four-year cycle is seen as an important milestone towards maturity.

Original: “What Are We Welcoming When Nasdaq Starts ‘On-Chain Stocks’?”

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