SEC pushes for US stocks to trade 24/7—will the biggest advantage of RWA no longer exist?

Author: Mahe, Foresight News

On July 23, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it will hold a public roundtable discussion at its Washington headquarters on September 17. The meeting will focus on preparations for the U.S. stock market to move toward 24-hour trading. It will cover the infrastructure that supports overnight trading, operations and resilience under 24-hour markets, and opportunities and challenges in expanding trading hours.

SEC Chair Paul S. Atkins said in a statement: “We are moving into a new day for the U.S. stock market— and a new night. As overnight trading expands, I look forward to the U.S. stock market aligning with markets that have already achieved continuous trading, while also looking forward to striking a balance between around-the-clock trading and protections that are vital for investors and clients.”

This roundtable may signal a key turning point for a substantial transition of U.S. equities from traditional sessions toward something close to an around-the-clock (23×5) model. For the crypto industry—especially the RWA (real-world asset) tokenization space—this change both compresses parts of the differentiation narrative and opens room for deeper integration.

U.S. stocks embrace change

Since 1985, the regular trading hours of exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have been fixed at 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. This arrangement has endured for more than four decades.

Keeping traditional trading hours has long been beneficial for concentrating price discovery and lowering operating costs. However, in today’s world where global capital flows are highly electronic, this setup is outdated. Asian and European investors who want to trade U.S. stocks during local daytime often have to rely on futures or thin pre-market and after-hours sessions, and their experience is far less smooth than trading crypto assets. Meanwhile, retail investors, accustomed to placing orders anytime through mobile apps, have grown increasingly impatient with the “waiting” feeling when they can’t trade immediately after major news releases.

Outside regular hours, there are limited extended trading windows. Pre-market trading typically starts at around midnight and ends at 9:30 a.m.; after-hours trading runs from 4:00 p.m. to around 8:00 p.m. These extended sessions are offered by exchanges, alternative trading systems (ATS), and broker platforms, but liquidity is significantly lower than during regular hours, spreads are wider, and price-discovery efficiency is lower. Regulators such as FINRA have repeatedly reminded investors that extended sessions carry higher volatility and execution risk.

In recent years, some brokers and ATS have further extended trading into overnight hours. For example, platforms such as Interactive Brokers offer overnight trading from Sunday 8:00 p.m. to about 3:50 a.m. on Friday (with a short maintenance window in between), covering parts of S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 constituents, and ETFs. However, based on observations from public markets, true overnight trading volume has long remained only a tiny fraction of the overall market, making it difficult to form deep price discovery.

Overall, U.S. stocks still have the core characteristic of “concentrated trading during weekday daytime,” with markets closed on weekends and most holidays. This is in stark contrast to the 7×24, year-round operation model of the crypto asset market, and it is also one of the frequently highlighted differences in RWA tokenization narratives.

23/5 trading?

Since 2024, multiple exchanges and market infrastructure providers have accelerated efforts toward near around-the-clock trading.

24X National Exchange is the first national securities exchange to receive SEC approval to conduct 23-hour trading (23×5). It plans to officially launch full 23/5 overnight trading in the second half of 2026. NYSE Arca plans to extend trading time to about 22 hours, with the target also pointing to the end of 2026. Nasdaq has publicly proposed the “Global Trading Hours” plan: adding a night session from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. the next day, which—combined with existing sessions—would create a trading day close to 23 hours. The target is also the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and alignment with industry infrastructure. Cboe is also advancing the 23×5 plans for platforms such as EDGX.

Infrastructure progress is even more critical. The DTCC subsidiary National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) launched 24×5 clearing services on June 28, 2026, covering trading activity from Sunday 8:00 p.m. to Friday 8:00 p.m. With this, it can provide central counterparty guarantees for overnight trades in real time, significantly reducing counterparty risk.

These developments suggest that by the end of 2026 to early 2027, U.S. equities could achieve near-continuous weekday trading within the regulatory framework. True 7×24 (including weekends) still faces higher barriers, but the direction of “money never sleeps” has moved from discussion into implementation. The roundtable on September 17 is precisely the SEC bringing exchanges, market makers, clearing entities, broker-dealers, and investor representatives together publicly on core issues—operational resilience, liquidity management, investor protection—before formal large-scale opening.

Crypto RWA platforms

As U.S. stocks move toward near around-the-clock trading, they directly impact one of the most commonly used selling points of RWA tokenization platforms in the past—“traditional markets only trade during the day, while on-chain you can trade 7×24.”

The current RWA market already has some scale, especially in perpetual contract trading volumes. According to Blockworks’ latest data, last week the RWA trading volume on the Hyperliquid platform first surpassed that of crypto-asset trading, reaching 54% of the platform’s total trading volume. Among them, stock trading became the fastest-growing category: since June, single-stock trading volume has exceeded that of indexes and commodities. It is now about 61% of Hyperliquid’s total RWA trading volume, showing that on-chain financial markets are expanding from trading crypto assets alone to including traditional assets.

After U.S. stocks extend trading hours, the appeal of simply “trading the underlying stocks during Asia hours or at night” will be diluted. Institutions and cross-border investors will be able to execute near around-the-clock trades more directly on regulated traditional exchanges and ATS, without needing to rely entirely on tokenized channels. In terms of compliance costs, custody, and settlement certainty, traditional paths may remain more attractive for many large capital pools.

However, the impact is not entirely negative.

The real advantages of 7×24 and near-instant atomic settlement still lie on-chain. Even if U.S. stocks reach 23×5, there will still be gaps on weekends and holidays, and clearing and settlement will still rely on the DTCC system, making it difficult to fully eliminate T+0 and T+1 frictions. RWA tokens can achieve near-instant transfers of ownership and settlement on public chains, and they naturally support programmable logic, including automated dividends, collateralization, and portfolios.

The regulatory environment is evolving in parallel. Under Paul Atkins, the SEC has clearly written “promoting on-chain trading of tokenized securities” into the 2026 regulatory agenda and is advancing a token classification framework. Tokenized securities are still defined as securities and thus fall under federal securities laws, but innovation exemptions and related rule adjustments are being discussed. DTCC is also moving forward with tokenized settlement pilot programs. The experience U.S. equities accumulate during the process of extending trading hours—overnight liquidity management, price protection, and system resilience—may in practice provide reference regulatory practices for compliant RWA secondary markets.

Some crypto platforms have explored partnerships—for example, linking tokenized U.S. stocks with traditional account systems and unifying global liquidity. On July 10 this year, Backpack launched the first real U.S. stock trading market with 7×24 true market hours for international investors. Users can buy and sell and hold real U.S. stocks anytime, not synthetic derivatives.

Ondo’s tokenized stocks use 1:1 underlying securities backing, and tie into traditional market liquidity through minting and redemption mechanisms. Users can trade these tokens directly on crypto exchanges, while non-U.S. users can gain U.S. stock exposure more conveniently.

For RWA platforms, the real moat is shifting from “trading-hours differences” to “settlement finality, cross-border accessibility, DeFi composability, and interoperability with traditional infrastructure.” Tokenization of off-public-market assets—such as private credit, real estate, and alternative assets—will be less impacted by changes in U.S. stock trading hours, and may even benefit as overall tokenization adoption increases.

Risks also need to be addressed. Overnight liquidity in the early stage will inevitably be thinner, and prices will be easier to push. If an RWA platform opens trading during low-liquidity windows, it must simultaneously strengthen risk controls, circuit breakers, and market-making mechanisms, otherwise it could amplify volatility and harm the industry’s reputation. Regulatory pressure faced by purely permissionless, synthetic-type products may also rise further as traditional markets extend trading hours; the value of compliance issuance and ATS/exchange pathways would correspondingly increase.