The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on July 23 that it will host a public roundtable at its Washington headquarters on Sept. 17 to discuss how the U.S. stock market can prepare for a move toward 24-hour trading. Topics on the agenda include infrastructure for overnight trading, operations and resilience in a round-the-clock market, and the opportunities and challenges tied to expanded hours.
SEC Chair Paul S. Atkins said, “We are moving toward a new day for the U.S. equity markets — and a new night. As overnight trading expands, I look forward to seeing U.S. equity markets align with markets that already trade continuously, while also maintaining a balance between around-the-clock trading and critically important investor and customer protections.”
The planned roundtable could mark an important step in the shift from traditional market hours toward a near-continuous 23×5 model for U.S. equities. For the crypto sector, and especially for tokenized real-world assets, that change cuts into part of the industry’s old differentiation story while opening the door to deeper links with traditional finance.
U.S. equities are moving away from fixed daytime trading
Since 1985, regular trading on exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq has remained fixed at 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. That structure has been in place for more than four decades.
The model helped centralize price discovery and keep operating costs lower. But in a market shaped by electronic capital flows across regions, its limits are increasingly obvious. Investors in Asia and Europe who want to trade U.S. stocks during their local daytime often have to rely on futures or thinner pre-market and after-hours sessions, a much less fluid experience than trading crypto assets. Retail traders, now used to placing orders through mobile apps at any time, are also less willing to wait when major news breaks outside regular market hours.
Outside the core session, U.S. stocks already trade in limited extended-hours windows. Pre-market trading usually runs from the early morning until 9:30 a.m., while after-hours trading typically continues from 4:00 p.m. to around 8:00 p.m. Those sessions are offered through exchanges, alternative trading systems, or ATSs, and broker platforms. Liquidity is materially lower than in the regular session, spreads are wider, and price discovery is less efficient. Regulators including FINRA have repeatedly warned investors that extended-hours trading carries higher volatility and execution risk.
In recent years, some brokers and ATS operators have pushed trading further into the night. Interactive Brokers and others offer overnight access from 8:00 p.m. on Sunday to about 3:50 a.m. on Friday, with short maintenance breaks in between, covering parts of the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100 and ETFs. Public market observations, however, show overnight turnover still accounts for only a very small share of total equity trading and has yet to provide deep price discovery.
For now, the defining feature of the U.S. stock market remains concentrated weekday daytime trading, with full closure on weekends and most holidays. That stands in sharp contrast to the 24/7, year-round structure of crypto markets and has long been one of the recurring talking points behind tokenized RWA products.
23×5 plans are taking shape
Since 2024, exchanges and market infrastructure providers have accelerated efforts to build something close to all-day weekday trading.
24X National Exchange became the first national securities exchange approved by the SEC to operate 23-hour trading, or 23×5, and plans to launch full 23/5 overnight trading in the second half of 2026. NYSE Arca plans to extend its schedule to roughly 22 hours, also targeting the end of 2026. Nasdaq has publicly proposed a Global Trading Hours plan that would add a 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. overnight session, which, when combined with current hours, would create a trading day close to 23 hours. That plan is also aimed at the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and alignment across industry infrastructure. Cboe is also advancing 23×5 plans for platforms including EDGX.
The infrastructure layer may matter even more. The National Securities Clearing Corporation, or NSCC, a DTCC subsidiary, launched a 24×5 clearing service on June 28, 2026. The service covers trading activity from 8:00 p.m. Sunday to 8:00 p.m. Friday and can provide central counterparty guarantees for overnight trades in real time, cutting counterparty risk.
Those developments suggest that by late 2026 or early 2027, U.S. equities could operate under a regulated market structure that is close to continuous during the workweek. True 7×24 trading, including weekends, still faces a higher bar. Even so, the direction is no longer theoretical. The Sept. 17 SEC roundtable is set to bring together exchanges, market makers, clearing institutions, brokers and investor representatives to align on operating resilience, liquidity management and investor protection before any broader rollout.
What this means for tokenized RWA platforms
For crypto RWA platforms, the most direct impact is on a familiar sales pitch: traditional markets trade only during the day, while on-chain markets stay open 24/7.
The RWA market already has some scale, especially in perpetuals activity. According to the latest data cited from Blockworks, RWA trading on Hyperliquid exceeded crypto-asset trading for the first time last week, accounting for 54% of the platform’s total volume. Single-stock products were the fastest-growing segment. Since June, single-stock trading volume has surpassed indexes and commodities and now makes up about 61% of Hyperliquid’s RWA volume. That points to on-chain finance extending beyond native crypto assets and further into traditional asset exposure.
If U.S. equity trading hours keep expanding, the appeal of simply being able to trade stocks in Asian hours or overnight becomes less distinctive. Institutions and cross-border investors will have a more direct path to near-all-day execution through regulated exchanges and ATS venues rather than relying entirely on tokenized channels. For many large pools of capital, the traditional route still carries more certainty on compliance costs, custody and clearing.
The on-chain edge does not disappear
The article does not frame the outcome as entirely negative for crypto.
True 7×24 access and near-instant atomic settlement remain key advantages for on-chain assets. Even if U.S. stocks move to 23×5, weekends and holidays would still be gaps in the market, while clearing and settlement would still rely on the DTCC system and would not fully remove T+0 and T+1 friction. Tokenized RWA instruments, by contrast, can support near-instant transfer of ownership and settlement on public blockchains, while also enabling programmable features such as automated dividends, collateralization and portfolio construction.
The regulatory backdrop is shifting as well. Under Atkins, the SEC has explicitly written the goal of promoting on-chain trading of tokenized securities into its 2026 regulatory agenda and is advancing a token classification framework. Tokenized securities are still treated as securities and remain subject to federal securities laws, but possible innovation exemptions and related rule adjustments are being discussed. DTCC is also moving ahead with tokenized-settlement pilots. In that sense, experience gained from managing overnight liquidity, price protection and system resilience in a longer-hours equity market could also serve as a reference point for compliant secondary markets in RWA.
Partnership models are already emerging
Some crypto platforms have already started testing links between tokenized U.S. equities, traditional account systems and global liquidity pools.
On July 10 this year, Backpack launched what it described as the world’s first 24/7 real U.S. stock trading market for international investors, allowing users to buy, sell and hold real U.S. shares around the clock rather than synthetic derivatives.
Ondo’s tokenized stock product uses 1:1 backing by the underlying securities and connects to traditional market liquidity through mint and redemption mechanisms. Users can trade those tokens directly on crypto exchanges, while non-U.S. investors can gain U.S. equity exposure more easily.
That leaves RWA platforms with a different set of moats. The competitive edge is shifting away from trading-hour differences and toward settlement finality, cross-border accessibility, DeFi composability and interoperability with traditional infrastructure. Tokenization of private credit, real estate and alternative assets in non-public markets may be less affected by changes in U.S. stock trading hours and could even benefit if broader acceptance of tokenization grows.
Liquidity and regulatory risk remain in view
The risks are still material. Overnight sessions are likely to remain thin in the early stage, which makes prices easier to move. If RWA platforms keep trading open during low-liquidity windows, they will need stronger risk controls, circuit breakers and market-making support. Without them, volatility could be amplified and confidence in the sector could be damaged.
The article also notes that purely permissionless and synthetic products may face rising regulatory pressure as traditional markets extend their own trading hours. That would increase the relative value of compliant issuance structures and pathways built around ATSs or exchange venues.
Even with the current push, U.S. equities will still likely remain fully closed on weekends and most holidays.