Author: Prathik Desai

Translated by: Block unicorn

Preface

Clocks are not a good way to mask delays. For decades, financial markets have been built around the speed of existing information transmission. They introduced closing bells, batch settlements, and regional exchanges, which made sense in an era of slow information transfer. But all of that has changed. Capital does not wait. Just as water will always find a crack, so will capital. Financial gravity will pull it toward the fastest paths of price information. This is the law of the market. Market participants will not tolerate inefficiency indefinitely.

This is what I have observed from a macro perspective regarding the developments in financial markets over the past few weeks.

In today's article, I will help you understand what has broken the old bundled structure of financial markets, transforming it into a more efficient, unbundled structure that spans different venues, packages, and times.

Job Change

I have been studying finance for over ten years. In the early stages of my education, I viewed traditional stock exchanges as the embodiment of the market. For most of their development, stock exchanges were places where everyone and everything converged: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technologies driving the market. They had indices tracking component stocks and clocks indicating trading times, telling everyone when they could trade and when they could not.

However, this situation has changed over the past few years. In fact, just in the past few weeks, we have seen multiple developments confirming this shift.

On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices authorized the S&P 500 Index to Trade[XYZ], allowing HIP-3 market deployers to launch the first and only perpetual derivative contract for the S&P 500 on the Hyperliquid exchange. The S&P 500 Index is the most closely followed large-cap index in the United States, tracking 500 leading companies and covering about 80% of the total market capitalization in the United States, which exceeds $61 trillion. This index covers at least half of the global stock market's value.

This is an index that has been around for nearly 70 years, yet it is being listed on a market that has only been established for six months.

On the day after S&P announced this news, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq's application to trade and settle certain stocks in token form. Nasdaq is one of the most active trading venues globally, and its nominal trading volume often exceeds that of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which is the largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world.

On March 16, Cboe Global Markets submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch "almost around-the-clock (24x5) trading of U.S. stocks." The largest operating entity behind this U.S. financial exchange stated that it was prepared to offer round-the-clock stock trading services as early as December 2026.

But why is this happening? More and more people are calling for extended trading hours for U.S. stocks.

These three initiatives are collectively targeting outdated bundled trading structures. The S&P 500 index futures trading market launched by Hyperliquid challenges the decades-long convention of investors only being able to trade traditional indices through traditional markets. It also enables global 24/7 trading of this most tracked large-cap index.

Nasdaq's tokenized stock trading initiative addresses infrastructure issues. It introduces a new form of encapsulation that allows the same stock to be traded in different ways. Previous attempts at tokenized stocks have been criticized by the industry.

Investors question whether these tokens have the same rights as the original shares.

But if I provide the same exposure to equity through tokens on the blockchain while retaining the voting rights and legal protections associated with the original dematerialized shares, wouldn’t you accept it?

Why would you do this? What benefit does it have for you?

So, what if you are an investor outside the U.S. wanting easier access to the stock markets of the largest economy in the world? What if this tokenized stock makes it easier for you to integrate it into collateral and lending systems?

As you consider around-the-clock trading, these advantages will multiply.

This is what Cboe is attacking. Its nearly around-the-clock (5 days a week, 24 hours a day) trading plan aims to acknowledge that capital will not wait for office hours. Traders always want to express their views immediately after gaining information. If Cboe does not provide them with a market to express their views, then traders will flock to other platforms that offer such markets.

What I am saying is not speculation or a "thing that may happen in the near future." It is happening right now as we speak.

A Fragmented Future

The adoption of financial product fragmentation is most evident in the HIP-3 market of Hyperliquid, which is officially launched in late October 2025.

In just the past month, the cumulative trading volume in the HIP-3 market has increased by $72 billion. The cumulative trading volume in the previous four months was $78 billion.

In March, Trade[XYZ] continued to represent 90% of daily trading volume in perpetual markets for traditional financial commodities and stocks. But this is not the most interesting aspect.

More than half of Trade[XYZ]'s trading volume came from the perpetual contract markets for silver, crude oil, Brent oil, and gold.

Hyperliquid provides a unified trading platform for trading spot cryptocurrencies as well as perpetual contracts for cryptocurrencies and traditional assets. This not only simplifies the trading process on a unified platform but also brings higher liquidity, a unified user interface, and smaller bid-ask spreads.

Traders still want to trade some of the largest and hottest assets, covering commodities, publicly traded companies, large private companies, and indices. You might want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, indices tracking the top 100 non-financial companies in the U.S., and the S&P 500 index—all of which can be done on the Hyperliquid platform.

The HIP-3 separates the ability to invest in these assets from the existing exchange infrastructure while still tracking the value of the underlying assets against their original benchmarks. Therefore, when you go long on the silver futures contract on HIP-3, the underlying asset it tracks is still linked to the value of one ounce of silver from the Pyth data source.

Traders have shifted from previous platforms to trade silver on HIP-3 because HIP-3 does not distinguish between U.S. and non-U.S. traders, nor does it adhere to any specific time. Whenever there is an event where traders want to express their views through asset pricing, HIP-3 provides them with a market, unbound by traders' geographic locations or time zones.

In recent weeks, the open interest (OI) on the Hyperliquid platform has seen significant growth, reflecting the above results. OI measures the total value of open derivative positions. Unlike trading volume, which reflects trading activity, OI reflects trading commitments.

The open interest on March 1 was $1.13 billion, which doubled to $2.2 billion by April 1. This shows that traders have confidence in Hyperliquid's perpetual contracts and are locking in funds.

These metrics indicate that when market access is more convenient and friction is reduced, traders are not loyal to any particular platform or asset class. They will choose any platform that can provide volatility, convenience, and liquidity.

This is why traditional institutions such as S&P, Nasdaq, and Cboe are taking measures to acknowledge this behavior.

At least two recent events have demonstrated the importance of around-the-clock trading and market volatility to traders.

Saurabh wrote in a tweet from Decentralised.Co, "On February 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran during market closures in traditional markets. Within hours, the price of perpetual contracts linked to oil surged 5% on the Hyperliquid platform as traders digested that shock in real-time."

Just two weeks after the outbreak of war, the trading volume of perpetual contracts linked to oil surged from $200 million to a cumulative $6 billion.

One major risk for emerging platforms is liquidity. If liquidity is insufficient, bid-ask spreads may widen, leading to traders facing pricing disadvantages that are more severe than on other platforms.

The week before last, as U.S. President Trump consulted with Iranian officials about having "productive talks," the Hyperliquid platform showcased its strong liquidity. The newly launched S&P 500 futures based on the HIP-3 platform was able to accurately track the performance of the CME E-mini S&P 500 futures down to the minute.

Although the on-chain perpetual contracts were about 50-70 points lower than the ES, the price movement was very similar.

What It Means

For decades, traditional markets have been bound together and have controlledvenues (exchanges), time (trading hours), and products (indices/contracts).

They chose to maintain the status quo because they failed to establish the necessary mechanisms to address inefficiencies such as time delays, trading hour restrictions, and regulatory limitations on non-U.S. investors. Instead, they covered up these inefficiencies and packaged them as procedural systems aimed at building trustworthy institutions to attract investors.

People will still trade and invest. This is not because they are foolish or gullible to the selling points of traditional financial markets. They do so because they have no choice. This situation began to change with the emergence of blockchain, which provides the world with on-chain markets that make trading and investing unprecedentedly convenient.

People see this option and seize it.

They did not care in the past, and they will not care about changes in market structure in the future. They do not care whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled. Whether the existing institutions are willing, as long as traders and investors can express their opinions more conveniently through financial instruments, they will accept the new market structure. It does not matter whether this structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, Cboe, or the S&P 500, or from permissionless platforms operating on blockchain.

The financial industry continues to evolve and will adopt any structure that can bridge the gap between events and expressing price opinions.

Important events are occurring around the world every moment. So why should prices wait until the clock in a glass building in New York starts ticking on Monday morning?

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