Wall Street’s big lie about 24-hour trading ignores the $4.5 billion crypto market that never actually closes its doors

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation spent 2025 building infrastructure for extended trading hours, targeting a 24×5 schedule that would keep US markets open from Sunday night through Friday evening with brief daily maintenance windows. Nasdaq filed plans for 23-hour trading days. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced it has developed a tokenized securities platform that is designed to enable “24/7 operations.” The industry framed the shift as transformative: always-on access for retail investors, parity with crypto's round-the-clock structure, modernization of decades-old plumbing. Meanwhile, Binance listed a silver perpetual contract on Jan. 7 that trades 24/7 with up to 50x leverage and is cash-settled in USDT. Hyperliquid's silver-linked perpetual printed over $4.5 billion in volume during January, with open interest around $152.4 million and funding rates hovering near neutral, suggesting two-way flow rather than purely speculative long positioning. The same venues also offer synthetic exposure to Tesla shares, 24/7 and stablecoin-margined. Wall Street is engineering a transition to near-continuous trading, while crypto derivatives markets already run continuously, referencing the same real-world prices traditional finance wants to quote after hours. This is not about tokenized securities with shareholder rights or on-chain settlement of equity ownership. These are perpetual futures, derivatives that track reference prices for commodities, stocks, or indices, margined and settled in stablecoins. The distinction matters because it defines what “already here” actually means: continuous synthetic exposure to real-world asset prices, not the assets themselves. Yet, for price discovery, risk transfer, and speculative positioning, the functional difference collapses. If an investor wants to express a view on silver or Tesla at 3 am on a Sunday, crypto derivatives markets are the only liquid venue. Traditional finance's proposed extended trading hours ma...