NYSE Shatters Trading Hours: 24/7 On-Chain Stock Trading Goes Live

The closing bell just lost its power. The New York Stock Exchange is flipping the script on traditional finance by launching round-the-clock trading for tokenized equities. No more waiting for Monday morning—markets now never sleep.

From Wall Street to Blockchain Street

This isn't just an extended hours program. It's a full migration of equity ownership onto distributed ledgers. Each tokenized stock becomes a programmable asset, trading continuously on a global digital marketplace. The 9-to-5 trading day? Officially obsolete.

Liquidity Never Takes a Break

The move unlocks perpetual capital flow. International investors bypass timezone tyranny. Corporate announcements trigger immediate price discovery—no more overnight gaps swallowing retail portfolios. Market efficiency just got a massive, caffeine-fueled upgrade.

The Infrastructure Revolution

Legacy settlement systems get sidelined. T+2 settlement vanishes, replaced by instant atomic swaps. Custody transforms from vaults to cryptographic keys. The backend plumbing of Wall Street is getting a complete blockchain overhaul—and it's happening faster than anyone predicted.

Traditional finance veterans are scrambling to adapt, while crypto natives see a long-awaited validation. One cynical observer noted it's the first time institutional traders might actually appreciate the 'hodl' mentality—they just call it 'strategic long-term positioning.' The market's future is on-chain, and it's open for business every second of every day.

ICE integrates banks like BNY and Citi

If approved, the platform WOULD support both fungible tokenized shares that are fungible with traditionally issued securities and natively issued digital securities. Tokenized shareholders would retain the same dividend and governance rights as traditional shareholders, with access provided to qualified broker-dealers on a non-discriminatory basis.

Lynn Martin, President, NYSE Group, stated, “We are leading the industry toward fully on-chain solutions, grounded in the unmatched protections and high regulatory standards that position us to marry trust with state-of-the-art technology. Harnessing our expertise to reinvent market infrastructure is how we’ll meet and shape the demands of a digital future.”

The platform for tokenized securities is part of Intercontinental Exchange’s and NYSE’s larger digital plan. The company revealed that it is already getting its clearing infrastructure ready to support trading 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

ICE said it is working with banks such as BNY and Citi to enable tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses. This will allow clearing members to handle funds outside of normal banking hours and meet margin requirements in different places and at different times.

Michael Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, ICE, stated, “Since its founding, ICE has propelled markets from analog to digital […] Supporting tokenized securities is a pivotal step in ICE’s strategy to operate on-chain market infrastructure for trading, settlement, custody, and capital formation in the new era of global finance.”

As reported by Cryptopolitan, BNY recently activated tokenized deposits that allow clients to move value across blockchain networks in NEAR real time while maintaining deposits in the bank’s regulated system. Industry participants, including ICE, Circle, and Baillie Gifford, are taking part in the initial rollout.

NYSE will be competing at a larger scale with Robinhood’s 24 Hour Market, which showed that retail appetite exists for overnight trading in megacap names. NYSE can match that access with deeper liquidity, surveillance, and brand trust.

Early institutional movers in tokenized equities

Tokenized equities are already booming with institutions that took the initiative earlier. For instance,  Kraken’s xStocks lets users trade tokenized versions of more than 50 US stocks and ETFs around the clock. Ondo Finance has issued over 100 tokenized US equities on ethereum and plans to extend to BNB Chain and Solana. 

Additionally, BitMEX runs equity perps synthetic exposure to US names and indices using crypto as collateral. Trust Wallet integrated tokenized real-world assets, so it’s reported that 200 million users can hold and swap them natively. eToro has revealed plans to tokenize US stocks on Ethereum with 24/7 trading.

Tokenized equities recorded surpassed $800M in market cap, a 2,500% increase from the $16 million recorded at the start of last year. pic.twitter.com/dFGJjiFdG2

— Sentora (previously IntoTheBlock) (@SentoraHQ) January 9, 2026

According to on-chain data, the market cap of tokenized stocks has increased by 16% over the last 30 days, surpassing $800 million. This figure represents a whopping 2,500% increase from the modest $16 million recorded just one year prior.

Also, the tokenized asset market almost quadrupled through the year to nearly $20 billion by the end of 2025. Jürgen Blumberg, COO of tokenization specialist Centrifuge, predicted that the total value locked (TVL) in real-world asset tokens will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2026, with more than half of the world’s top 20 asset managers launching tokenized products.

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