WallStreetBets: 24/7 Trading Is the Ultimate Form of Financial Markets

Author: WallStreetBets, Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Over the past decade, the crypto industry has built a trading system for native crypto assets: spot exchanges, perpetual contracts, stablecoins, lending protocols, and a full-fledged Meme coin ecosystem. This has also cultivated an entire generation of users accustomed to entering the market at any time, global liquidity, and a trading market unbound by the 4 PM closing time of U.S. stocks.

In my view, the next super cycle in the crypto industry is migrating traditional real-world assets onto the blockchain. Stocks, U.S. Treasuries, mutual funds, gold, crude oil, and credit products will all be on-chain.

Assets like gold and Nvidia need no additional introduction. The real transformation opportunity lies in changing the channels through which the public trades assets, trading hours, and the various ways to operate assets after purchase.

The financing and secondary market performance of Elon Musk's SpaceX have already demonstrated a new asset circulation model. The same asset can generate liquidity simultaneously on traditional brokerages, private markets, and crypto platforms. Traditional brokerages accept IPO intention subscriptions, private platforms open early-stage shares to qualified investors, and the crypto sector lists SpaceX IPO perpetual contracts and tokenized related products, matching traders' expectations for the stock's opening price.

Early derivatives could not meet market demand due to insufficient underlying circulation shares. Traders had to navigate through brokerages, private markets, perpetual contracts, and tokenized products just to gain exposure to the related asset.

This is the core trend most people overlook. The source of assets can be the traditional financial system, but the boundaries of trading and circulation will completely break through traditional frameworks.

Stablecoins have already completed the on-chain migration of the U.S. dollar, enabling global free flow of funds and settlement even when banks are closed. Now, stocks, funds, and commodities are following the same path.

Why is the Tokenization Wave Breaking Out Now?

For years, asset tokenization remained a conceptual idea. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once compared the traditional financial system to regular mail, with tokenization being email. Subsequently, BlackRock launched the BUIDL fund, with underlying assets consisting of cash, short-term U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements. Investors hold tokens stably valued at $1, with returns distributed in the form of new tokens. Compliant investors can transfer holdings between on-chain wallets.

Franklin Templeton had already deployed its government money market fund infrastructure on-chain, under the product name BENJI. Now, BENJI is further expanding its business, collaborating with multiple banks and digital asset platforms for trading and collateral financing.

These underlying asset classes have long existed. What tokenization changes is the way asset ownership is registered, the speed of transferring holdings, and the reusability of financial scenarios after issuance.

Robinhood has launched over 200 U.S. stock and ETF tokens for EU users, covering assets like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, supporting 24/7 trading five days a week.

Plume Network focuses on the asset issuance side, providing asset management institutions with a one-stop infrastructure for building on-chain assets, eliminating the need to build entire systems from scratch.

TheoriqAI sits above the issuance layer, building various investment strategies that deploy tokenized assets into on-chain lending and vault value-added scenarios.

A few years ago, the industry was still debating whether large traditional financial institutions would adopt public blockchains. Now, the answer is clear: major institutions have already begun practical implementation.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev recently stated that the biggest opportunity in crypto is not creating more native crypto tokens, but becoming the underlying infrastructure for real-world assets. Tokenized stocks, futures, and private market assets are precisely the convergence point where traditional finance and crypto merge.

Robinhood's aggressive push into the tokenization business has also brought this topic out of the crypto echo chamber and into the public eye.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he has been following the tokenization track for years: "The core highlight isn't the token itself, but the significant reduction in transaction friction."

This is the core reason why the tokenization topic is heating up so quickly. The market is not chasing the concept of "tokenization" itself, but innovative financial products with zero friction. The industry's discussion focus has shifted from "whether assets can be tokenized" to "which tokenized products can retain long-term users."

Asset tokenization has been technically feasible for a long time; the real challenge is continuously retaining users.

Hyperliquid Proves 24/7 Trading is a Market Necessity

HyperliquidX confirms that traders will actively flock to efficient, highly liquid, around-the-clock trading platforms.

Perpetual contracts were the first category to be implemented because they are synthetic assets, bypassing the need to solve custody, settlement, and various compliance legal issues all at once to quickly list underlying assets.

The process of bringing real-world assets on-chain is more complex, requiring matching custody, settlement, and regulatory frameworks for different countries one by one.

The perpetual contract market has already validated traders' strong demand for 24/7 non-stop trading. The industry is now beginning to explore more market structures that can be migrated on-chain.

Synapse Protocol is building the underlying infrastructure for options trading. Its portfolio margin system allows market makers to use Hyperliquid perpetual contract positions as margin for option sellers, hedging against the price fluctuation risk of the underlying asset. This mechanism is particularly friendly to emerging assets. Hypercall has already listed SPCX options, supporting intraday and same-day expiry contracts, providing trading exposure not available on Nasdaq venues.

Ondo Finance extends this model to public markets. Ondo Global Markets connects tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs to crypto wallets, using stablecoins as the trading medium; Ondo Perps offers traders 24/7 leveraged exposure, based on the Ondo ONE system.

Crypto users are already familiar with this operational logic: deposit stablecoins, select the underlying asset, and complete the trade. The existing challenge for the industry is that after tokenized assets enter wallets, sufficient liquidity and diverse value-added scenarios need to be built to retain users.

Stocks: The Easiest Consumer-Grade Tokenized Assets to Popularize

SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Coinbase, Robinhood, and the S&P 500 index are all well-known underlying assets to the public. This is the core reason why major exchanges prioritize listing stock tokens.

Robinhood first launched U.S. stock and ETF tokens for EU users. Subsequently, it even developed its own proprietary public chain, upgrading its business from trading stock tokens within the app to becoming the underlying network for various on-chain asset transfers. Robinhood has successfully pushed stock tokens to a massive number of retail investors outside the crypto circle.

Before stock tokens became the core narrative of the crypto industry, projects like Streamex were already deeply involved in this track.

Bitget is a representative case, intuitively demonstrating the complete ecosystem of embedding tokenized stocks into crypto exchange accounts. Bitget launched "Stocks 2.0," issuing rToken tokens through the compliant RWA protocol Reality. The platform states that rToken solves several industry pain points: directly connecting to Nasdaq and NYSE liquidity, pegging 1:1 to the underlying asset, synchronizing corporate dividends, and completing the entire settlement process within the Bitget ecosystem.

rNVDA and rTSLA are the most intuitive examples: the familiar Nvidia and Tesla stocks are no longer stored in traditional brokerage accounts but are instead included in crypto trading accounts.

Regular investors can still buy Nvidia and Tesla through traditional apps. The main change lies in the deposit scenario after asset purchase. In traditional brokerage accounts, stock assets are isolated within the broker's proprietary system. In crypto exchange accounts, compliant stock tokens can share the same pool of funds with spot, margin, grid trading, copy trading, and wealth management value-added products, with dividends automatically converted to USDT and credited to the account balance.

Holdings are directly counted as available trading funds, rather than being separately isolated in a brokerage account.

Bitget believes that when stock tokens, crypto spot, collateral, and various derivatives coexist in the same account, the utility value of the assets increases significantly.

Gracy, an executive at Bitget, stated that traditional brokerage direct connection channels can solve liquidity and dividend issues, while Bitget achieves the same advantages through tokenization, while retaining the full range of asset usage scenarios within the crypto account.

The crypto trading app Fomo is closer to ordinary users, integrating exposure to both crypto assets and real-world assets into the same mobile trading interface. Its core role is product distribution and underlying asset exposure, without participating in asset issuance or underlying trading infrastructure.

The RWA Ecosystem on Solana

Within six months, real-world assets launched on Solana via the Sunrise protocol have accumulated over $3.5 billion in transaction volume, spanning 14 million transactions across approximately 221,000 wallet addresses.

Sunrise utilizes Wormhole's native token transfer framework to deploy issuer-specified assets onto Solana. Wallets, aggregators, and liquidity platforms can uniformly connect to the same asset address, eliminating the need to split liquidity across multiple wrapped versions.

The SPCX tokenized product perfectly demonstrates this operational logic. Backpack Securities handled the compliant securities issuance. On the day of SpaceX's Nasdaq listing, Sunrise simultaneously deployed its token on the Solana chain. Within the first 24 hours of launch, the asset traded over $50 million across 51 trading markets on Solana, surpassing $100 million in transaction volume within four days.

Backpack handles securities compliance and user asset access; Sunrise connects Solana ecosystem traders, liquidity, and cross-chain routing. The cycle from asset issuance to listing and trading is significantly shortened, but whether the underlying asset can sustain trading volume ultimately depends on market demand.

Commodities: A Bridge Connecting Institutions and Retail

U.S. Treasuries are the most successful category for institutional-side RWA adoption, with the core advantage being the ability to generate stable yields on-chain. Stocks are the optimal asset for retail, with Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and S&P 500 having broad appeal. Commodities fall somewhere in between. Institutions use them for hedging risk, as collateral reserves, for real economy exposure, and for macro asset allocation.

Gold, crude oil, silver, copper, natural gas, and mineral rights fall under the commodities category. The traditional trading market for commodities is already mature. The difficulty has always been convenient access channels for ordinary investors.

The barrier to holding physical commodities is extremely high. ETFs simplified the purchase process via brokerages, while futures are geared towards professional traders. Tokenization adds a third path, allowing assets to trade outside traditional hours, settle faster, and be directly used in various on-chain financial markets.

Not all commodities are suitable for on-chain tokenization. Crude oil has different benchmarks, storage locations, delivery contracts, and quality standards. Copper and natural gas also face challenges related to physical delivery. Gold has the lowest barrier, with global circulation, sufficient liquidity, a unified pricing system, and widespread trading via ETFs and futures. PAXG and XAUT also prove users are willing to hold gold on-chain.

Currently, the mainstay of the on-chain RWA market is still U.S. Treasuries. The logic of this product is simple and clear: hold short-term Treasury bills, distribute the yield to token holders.

The on-chain scale of commodities remains relatively small, but the off-chain spot market is enormous.

Gold serves as the perfect test case to verify whether tokenization can optimize the trading, transfer, and yield distribution models of commodities, rather than just creating another digital certificate for an underlying asset.

GLDY: A Tokenized Gold Product with Yield Generation

As a millennia-old store of value, most forms of holding gold do not generate cash flow yields. GLDY's design philosophy targets this pain point directly: hold a gold token and earn additional gold yield.

Each token corresponds to 1 ounce of standard physical gold reserve. Streamex states that the product's expected dividends are distributed in the form of additional gold, with the yield sourced from gold leasing operations. Streamex's official website data shows current total gold reserves of 3,096.6072 ounces.

Custodied gold can be leased to compliant enterprises in the gold supply chain, including refineries, mints, and jewelry manufacturers. Lessees pay lease fees in the form of gold, which is then distributed as yield to token holders.

Most tokenized gold products offer only digital custody. GLDY adds a gold leasing value layer, creating a fundamentally different yield model, distinct from simply holding tokens in a wallet.

Like all tokenized assets, the product's survival depends on a complete supporting trading ecosystem: holders need reserve verification, regular dividend payouts, compliant trading channels, and a clear understanding of the income source.

The platform's Q1 2026 financial report shows GLDY's assets under management (AUM) at approximately $14 million at the end of the quarter, with gold reserves of 3,096 ounces. The first two monthly dividends distributed a total of 10.48 ounces of gold to users. Orca and Wintermute serve as its underlying infrastructure partners.

The platform has partnered with Siebert Financial and tZERO to access traditional brokerage channels. Siebert's wealth management and institutional clients can participate in GLDY through their existing brokerage accounts, while tZERO provides custody services through its compliant digital securities platform. Siebert manages over $20 billion in AUM, providing a vast distribution channel outside the crypto ecosystem.

Parent company Streamex is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker STEX, allowing secondary market investors to hold equity in the platform directly. In July this year, the company's board approved a share buyback plan for up to 10 million shares at a maximum buyback price of $2, with management believing the current stock price significantly undervalues the business.

This ecosystem is fully integrated: Orca provides the secondary trading market, Wintermute provides market making and liquidity, Chainlink provides data oracle for reserve verification of gold inventory, Aurum handles the data layer, and Siebert provides access to traditional wealth management clients.

I am continuously tracking three core metrics: can the gold reserve scale, monthly dividend totals, and secondary market trading volume all grow steadily in tandem? This is the ultimate litmus test for all tokenized assets.

The token itself is not the product. The complete trading and value-add market built around the token is the core value.

Long-Term Watchpoints

I do not believe real-world asset tokenization is a one-sided bull market. I am more focused on innovative products that can fundamentally change how underlying assets are used.

For stocks, I want to see if traders will continue to use the tokenized versions when traditional markets are closed, and whether these positions will function within their other portfolios.

For funds, I am observing whether they will move beyond the issuance phase and begin being used as collateral or integrated into other financial products.

Commodities are my most watched testbed. Holding a gold token in a wallet is easy to understand. The real challenge is providing sufficient reason for users to abandon ETFs and traditional futures in favor of on-chain gold tokens.

Will users still be trading a month later? Can the asset be freely transferred across platforms? Can dividend yields grow in line with the underlying reserves? If the answer to all of these is yes, then a truly new, mature market can be said to have formed.

Five years ago, the industry debated whether traditional financial institutions would adopt public blockchains. Today, financial markets are gradually implementing crypto technology as underlying infrastructure.

If this trend continues, eventually, all assets will become tokenized.

Traditional markets have fixed closing times. The crypto market is open 24/7.