US equity markets still work to a trading day that ends at 4pm in New York, and companies time their results around it. Tokenised versions of the same shares, and perpetual futures that track them, now trade around the clock on crypto exchanges, including overnight and at weekends when the primary exchanges are shut.
Gracy Chen is chief executive of Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange that lists tokenised stocks and equity perpetuals. In this contributed piece she argues that price discovery is moving to venues that never close, and that traditional markets will have to respond. The views are her own.
There is a choreography to earnings season that everyone in finance knows by heart. A company reports after the closing bell. Analysts and reporters spend the evening pulling the numbers apart. The rest of us wait for the next morning, when the market opens, and the stock finally moves. That sequence has organised professional investing for decades, and it rests on one quiet assumption: that between the report and the open, nothing can really trade.
That assumption is no longer true, and I don’t think most of Wall Street has noticed.
The same household names, Apple, Nvidia and Tesla, now trade around the clock. Tokenised versions of them, and the derivatives that track them, can now change hands at 2am on a Sunday as well as at 2pm on a Tuesday. So when a company reports at 4.05pm, and its guidance disappoints, the repricing no longer waits politely for the next session. It starts immediately, somewhere in the world, on a venue that never closed.
I can put a number on it. Over the weekend of 13 July, big geopolitical news broke while US exchanges were dark. On our platform, trading in tokenised stocks ran more than ten times a normal week, led by tokenised Nvidia. Investors were repricing exposure to major American companies in real time, while the primary exchanges remained closed. That is a preview.
Here is why it matters, and it has nothing to do with crypto. Price discovery follows whoever is open when the news breaks. If a story lands at 8pm and the only markets awake are the always-on ones, that is where the first layer of discoverability begins. The 9.30am open stops being the main event and becomes a catch-up mechanism. A market that keeps bankers’ hours in a world of around-the-clock information is quietly giving away the one thing an exchange is for: setting the price.
And this shift could accelerate as AI agents become a more active part of trading. More than half of our users already lean on AI tools; an agent doesn’t keep office hours, and it doesn’t wait for New York to wake up. You cannot build autonomous, always-on trading on top of a market that closes at 4pm and all weekend. The software is ready but the market’s clock is the bottleneck.
None of this means the old frictions were pointless. Thin overnight liquidity is real, and so is the risk of violent moves when fewer people are around to take the other side. As an exchange operator, I see these trade-offs directly. But they are arguments for building the always-on market carefully, with deeper liquidity and real market-makers on the other side at 3am, not for pretending the clock still holds. Demand does not wait for permission but instead moves to wherever it can act.
Today, the tokenised versions of traditional assets are a rounding error, a fraction of a per cent of the markets they mirror. I think that will reach close to 10 per cent within five years. In dollar terms, that is trillions, not a niche: trillions of dollars of stocks, funds, and commodities that will trade whenever their owner, or their owner’s AI agent, decides to, instead of whenever an exchange decides to open its doors.
The earnings call already went 24/7. The information, the reaction, and increasingly the trading does too. The only open question is whether the market itself stays open to meet it. We’ve made our bet by building the one that doesn’t close. The rest of finance will have to decide how long it can afford to keep the lights off.
The post The Earnings Call Went 24/7. Wall Street’s Clock Didn’t appeared first on The Fintech Times.
