Market data infrastructure provider Exegy has published a white paper arguing that capital markets firms in 2026 face a structural inflection point: the ability to absorb expanding liquidity sources quickly now matters more than the scale of in-house infrastructure. The report, titled “The Infrastructure Tax of Total Market Access,” sets out four forces it says are compounding operational complexity across trading desks simultaneously.
Four forces, one breaking point
Exegy frames the challenge around four converging pressures. First, asset-class boundaries are dissolving as equities, derivatives, digital assets, tokenised instruments and prediction markets require unified treatment rather than separate data stacks. Second, liquidity growth in MENA, APAC and LATAM is pushing firms to add regional connectivity faster than their operational footprints can absorb. Third, the rise of near-continuous 24/5 trading, anchored in the US by overnight alternative trading systems (ATS) including Blue Ocean, Bruce and MOON, has created a persistent liquidity environment without standardised price references. Fourth, market fragmentation across hundreds of venues, dark pools and decentralised protocols is generating compounding integration debt that Exegy labels the “infrastructure tax.”
The numbers cited to support these claims are substantive. Average daily message traffic on Abu Dhabi’s reached a peak depth of €87.4 million in March 2026. Shanghai’s Layer 2 message volumes climbed from 106.5 million per day in 2024 to 180.9 million in 2026. MOON ATS overnight notional activity surged more than 200% between late 2025 and early 2026, a move Exegy attributes partly to South Korean brokerages holding a record $171.8 billion in US equity positions that diversified away from single-venue reliance after a 2024 market outage. Brazil’s B3 is projecting $85 billion in foreign capital inflows in 2026, nearly triple the prior year.
On the digital asset side, decentralised perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid processed roughly $2.6 trillion in notional volume during 2025 with a lean operational structure, a data point Exegy uses to illustrate how software-defined infrastructure can support institutional throughput without proportional overhead. Prediction market platform Polymarket recorded 2025 volumes exceeding $22 billion, with 2026 activity already pacing to break $30 billion. Exegy positions these venues as a growing slice of the market data universe that institutions must now normalise alongside traditional feeds.
Regulatory read-across
The regulatory dimension gives the argument additional weight. Exegy notes that three consolidated tape initiatives are arriving simultaneously. The European Consolidated Tape for shares and ETFs launched in July 2026, eliminating the need for firms to manually aggregate hundreds of order books. The UK’s consolidated bond and derivatives tape, which began rolling out in June 2026, brings exchange-style transparency to over-the-counter fixed income pricing. Canada’s consolidated best bid and offer initiative closes a persistent gap in North American equity data. Exegy’s own Overnight Best Bid and Offer product, the OBBO, is positioned alongside these regulatory constructs as a voluntary consolidated reference for overnight US equity trading, where no regulatory tape yet exists.
The company’s commercial interest in this analysis is transparent: Exegy sells its Axiom managed data-as-a-service platform as the solution to exactly the infrastructure fragmentation it describes, citing server footprint reductions of up to 47% in recent deployments. That caveat noted, the structural argument is consistent with a broader industry direction. The shift from bespoke normalisation stacks toward managed data services is observable across tier-one banks and well-capitalised trading firms. Vendors including Refinitiv, ICE Data Services and Bloomberg occupy the same general space, meaning Exegy’s differentiation rests on latency performance, FPGA-accelerated architecture and the breadth of its overnight and digital asset coverage rather than on novelty alone.
The paper’s central conclusion, that competitive advantage in 2026 belongs to firms that can absorb new liquidity sources without rebuilding infrastructure each time market structure shifts, reflects a real operational debate inside trading technology budgets. Whether managed services or in-house builds win that argument will depend heavily on firm size, latency requirements and risk appetite for third-party dependency.
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