Taiwan stocks’ “typhoon holiday” closure—Japan and South Korea see a big rally, and investors are saying they made so much less than they should… Don’t Taiwan stocks run 24/7?

Taiwan stocks are closed for Typhoon leave today due to the storm, but the Nikkei is up by nearly 1,000 points and KOSPI is up more than 3.5%, prompting many retail investors to complain that they “could have earned more.” In the future, could Taiwan stocks move closer to cryptocurrencies and offer a longer-term, real-time trading market?
(Background: Coinbase announced it will launch 1:1 tokenized stocks! Support for on-chain trading and automatic dividend distribution)
(Extra background: Robinhood vs xStocks tokenized stocks—the key is where rights boundaries lie)

Taiwan stocks are closed today because Typhoon “Bavi” struck Taiwan. Taipei City announced that public and educational agencies will stop work on Friday, and the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the GreTai Securities Market issued notices that the centralized market will be closed for the whole day. But today, Asia stocks generally rebounded: the Nikkei 225 index once surged more than 1,400 points, closing up by about 1,000 points; South Korea’s KOSPI Composite Index jumped more than 3.5%, with Samsung Electronics and SK hynix both rising by more than 4%.

A group of retail investors vented on social media: If trading had been open today and they caught this wave of Asian market gains, they would have made so much less…

Cryptocurrencies don’t take Typhoon leave

We know that spot and derivatives markets for Bitcoin and Ethereum run 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. They keep matching orders regardless of typhoons, Christmas, or wars breaking out, because the settlement logic doesn’t require “closing the market.”

Now this concept is gradually converging with traditional stock markets as well: the U.S. 24X exchanges were approved by the SEC in November 2024, becoming the first national exchange to allow trading five days a week for 23 hours per day. The first phase went live on October 14, 2025, and the second phase is expected in the second half of 2026 to expand to continuous execution from Sunday evening through Friday evening, leaving only 1 hour each day for technical maintenance.

Nasdaq also plans to launch 24-hour trading in the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval; the NYSE announced in January 2026 that it is developing a blockchain platform, aiming to provide 24/7 trading for U.S. stocks and ETFs, also pending SEC approval.

Can Taiwan stocks avoid being closed?

So, can Taiwan stocks work like cryptocurrencies? The biggest hurdle right now may be the underlying settlement infrastructure.

Taiwan stocks use centralized settlement: T+2 physical delivery, a single centralized market, and brokerages requiring physical staffing to be on-site. If any one link halts, the whole chain has to stop—having a single city stop work is enough to cause nationwide knock-on effects. Cryptocurrencies, however, are decentralized: on-chain real-time settlement with globally distributed nodes executing in parallel. There is no “headquarters” that can be shut down by a typhoon.

So in the short term, Taiwan stocks are unlikely to achieve 24-hour trading. Physical delivery, centralized settlement, and broker staffing schedules are real constraints. But in the future, tokenization (tokenization) plus blockchain-based settlement might offer a solution.