Author: Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow
The world is turning into a never-closing exchange.
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 orders placed in dollar amounts. The partners are BNY Mellon and Citigroup, both established players.
The plan is still awaiting regulatory approval. But the direction is set.
Lynn Martin, President of the NYSE, said:
"For over 200 years, we have been changing the way markets operate. We are leading the industry towards a fully on-chain solution."
Claiming to lead, but in reality, it's catching up.
Last week, the CEO of ICE, the parent company of the NYSE, just mentioned: "We are chasing Robinhood."
ICE has a market value 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, with 24-hour trading and stablecoin settlement. Their CEO said: "Once you experience a 24/7 market, you can't go back."
The previous hierarchy of disdain was that Wall Street looked down on internet brokerages, and internet brokerages looked down on crypto exchanges. Now the NYSE is learning from Robinhood's playbook, and Robinhood is using the infrastructure of the crypto world.
Mutual integration, reversing the hierarchy, everything is tradable, and no one looks down on anyone.
This time, the NYSE aims to dismantle three walls.
The first wall is time.
U.S. stocks used to close at 4 PM, and the NYSE was legally required to shut down. The problem is that the Earth is round; when New York is asleep, Tokyo is awake, and global investors 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 exploded over the weekend? Nasdaq would be closed, but tokenized Tesla on the blockchain could still be traded. The price oracle wouldn't update from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, leaving everyone trading a "ghost price" disconnected from the real world for 48 hours.
At that time, this was considered a flaw of tokenization. The NYSE's response now is: Well, I will also be open 24 hours, so there won't be this problem, right?
Next is space.
Previously, if an Indonesian wanted to buy U.S. stocks, they had to open a U.S. stock account, exchange for dollars, wait for T+1 settlement, and go through a bunch of compliance procedures. Now, with stablecoin deposits, theoretically, one can buy directly with USDT.
The CEO of ICE, the parent company of the NYSE, said in an interview last week: Stablecoins are making the world "dollarized."
Previously, U.S. dollar hegemony relied on oil settlements and the SWIFT system; now there is an additional on-chain route. ICE is already collaborating with BNY Mellon and Citigroup to create "tokenized deposits," allowing institutions to continue transferring funds after bank hours, adjusting positions across time zones, and topping up margins at midnight. The constraints of time zones on finance are becoming less significant.
Finally, the threshold. When the NYSE talks about "placing orders in dollar amounts," it means you can buy 0.001 shares. Previously, one share of Berkshire Hathaway cost over $700,000; now, theoretically, you can hold a tiny fraction for just $1.
The market for tokenized stocks is still small; RWA.xyz data shows a global total market cap of about $340 million at the end of last year, but it has multiplied several times in a year. Kraken, Bybit, and Robinhood all rushed to launch such products last year.
The NYSE is the latest to enter the scene. It is also the most significant player.
However, if this is interpreted as crypto finally breaking through and winning, it might be a bit self-congratulatory.
24-hour trading, stablecoin settlement, on-chain clearing, fractional ownership… all these things have been developed by the crypto world over the past decade. But we haven't managed to turn this into any large-scale application; to this day, we are still arguing about meme coin fluctuations and airdrop farming.
Now Wall Street has taken this entire infrastructure and is using it to trade Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. It's somewhat like the internet bubble; after the chaos, the survivors were Amazon and Google.
The bubble burst, but the infrastructure remained, only with a different group of people making money on it.
In fact, I believe what is truly expanding is not cryptocurrency, but the concept of "tradability" itself.
During last year's U.S. elections, the trading volume on Polymarket exceeded $100 million in a single day. A prediction market turned "who will be president" into a tradable contract.
In New York, someone tokenized a Manhattan apartment, allowing you to own a fraction of a building for a few hundred dollars, profiting or losing money as the property value fluctuates. Others are monitoring the order volume of a Domino's pizza near the Pentagon; a sudden surge in orders might indicate that the Department of Defense is working overnight, possibly signaling something significant is about to happen, which can also become a trading signal.
The walls of time have been torn down, the walls of space have been torn down, and the walls of thresholds have also been torn down. Everything can become something tradable.
The NYSE's action today is just another step in this direction.
Nasdaq also submitted a similar application last September, and the U.S. Depository Trust Company received SEC approval in December, expecting to launch in the second half of this year. The NYSE's announcement today has actually moved ahead in the timeline.
Indeed, everyone is competing for the same thing: to make trading never stop.
The Earth doesn't sleep; why should the market?
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