The ultimate integration of Web3 and traditional finance: Tokenized settlement drives U.S. stock trading into the "24/7 era"

Article by: Max.S & Linda Zheng Zheng

In the spectrum of most investors’ perceptions, NASDAQ is often simply defined as a stock exchange, home to tech giants like NVIDIA, Tesla, and Apple. However, at a quantitative investment summit held in January, Ms. Anny Liu, MD of NASDAQ Data Services China and Singapore, used a set of data and strategic insights to redefine this giant’s identity: it is not just a venue for matching buy and sell orders, but a fintech company serving over 100 global exchanges, providing anti-financial crime systems and front-end and back-end management technology.

By 2025, the U.S. stock market is on the brink of dramatic transformation. From explosive liquidity growth to the upcoming “23-hour trading” that will break time zone barriers, to the shocking proposal of stock tokenization submitted to the SEC, and the liquidity revolution in the private markets. For quant funds and professional investors in the Asia-Pacific region, a paradigm shift is underway regarding infrastructure, trading strategies, and asset structures.

Data shows that in 2025, there will be a total of 336 IPOs across the U.S., with 281 on NASDAQ, raising a total of $70 billion. Over the past two decades, only five years have seen more than 300 IPOs, and 2025 not only ranks among them but also shows a steady upward trend post-pandemic.

This prosperity in the primary market directly influences the microstructure of the secondary market, most notably in extreme liquidity stratification and retail investor participation.

Anny Liu shared a striking comparison: as a partner of NASDAQ, a top domestic cloud provider monitored peak trading volumes across major markets. The peak in the A-shares market is about 18,000 trades per second, the Hong Kong market about 65,000 trades per second, while NASDAQ’s peak data reaches an astonishing 200,000 trades per second.

It’s important to note that this 200,000 trades/sec only reflects NASDAQ’s matching capacity. In the fragmented U.S. market structure, NASDAQ accounts for about 50%-60% of total trading volume. When including options markets, the peak reaches an astronomical 20 million trades per second.

Behind this excess liquidity is an extremely concentrated trading universe and frenzied retail sentiment. By the end of 2025, active stock lists include the usual “FAANG” (Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft), along with numerous crypto-related ETFs (like BTC, ETH ETFs) and silver ETFs. This indicates a profound shift in the investor composition of the U.S. market, with individual investors’ demand for high-volatility and alternative assets reshaping liquidity distribution.

For quant firms, this means the data volume for traditional Order Book analysis models is exponentially increasing, and competition for millisecond-level latency has become fierce.

If liquidity growth is a linear quantitative change, then extending trading hours is a structural qualitative change.

Historically, U.S. stock trading hours were from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with pre-market and after-hours trading totaling about 16 hours. However, NASDAQ has officially announced plans to extend trading hours to 23 hours.

This decision is not impulsive but based on precise capture of capital flows. NASDAQ data shows that in current after-hours trading, 80% of volume comes from outside the U.S. Among these, Asian investors, especially from Korea, contribute astonishing liquidity — in some periods, Korean trading volume even accounts for half of the after-hours volume.

This transformation presents both enormous opportunities and significant infrastructure challenges for quant firms in the Asia-Pacific:

Infrastructure Arms Race: The “downtime” previously used for system maintenance, data cleaning, and model training has almost disappeared. To support 23-hour continuous trading, hardware, network bandwidth, and disaster recovery systems must be comprehensively upgraded to handle round-the-clock high-frequency throughput.

Restructuring Human Resources: The traditional “sunrise to sunset” trader shift pattern will become obsolete. Firms need to establish 24-hour trading desks covering global time zones, which involves not only increasing staffing but also reshaping risk control processes — when New York is sleeping, Seoul and Singapore’s volatile movements must be captured and responded to in real time.

Golden Window for Cross-Market Arbitrage: As U.S. trading hours overlap with Asian markets, arbitrage opportunities between A-shares, Hong Kong stocks, and U.S.-linked assets (like Chinese concept stocks and cross-market ETFs) will increase exponentially. Quant strategies capable of low-latency routing across multiple markets will generate significant Alpha.

In the Web3 space, RWA (Real-World Assets) has been a hot topic, but often limited by compliance and infrastructure. Now, the world’s largest traditional financial giant, NASDAQ, is actively opening this door.

Traditional Model vs. Tokenization Model

Anny Liu revealed that NASDAQ has submitted filings to the SEC to launch stock tokenization trading. The revolutionary aspect is that it does not simply issue a new token; instead, it maintains the existing ticker, order book, and matching engine, while changing the backend settlement mechanism.

Traditional Model: Although U.S. stocks have shortened settlement to T+1, they still fundamentally rely on DTCC’s centralized ledger, involving complex clearing and settlement processes, with capital lock-up costs still present.

Tokenization Model: Using blockchain technology, stock trading can achieve atomic settlement. When an investor buys a tokenized stock, it signifies the immediate transfer of ownership — effectively T+0.

For investors, purchasing “tokenized stocks” offers rights identical to traditional stocks — dividend rights and voting rights are unchanged. But in trading experience, it will have the immediacy and programmability similar to cryptocurrencies.

On one side, traditional giants like NASDAQ are pushing compliant tokenized settlement from the top down; on the other, Web3-native forces are accelerating RWA adoption. Platforms like MSX MaTong, a decentralized RWA platform, have begun supporting direct purchases of RWA spot and derivatives using USDT/USDC/USD1. Unlike NASDAQ’s underlying infrastructure overhaul, these native platforms focus on leveraging existing DeFi infrastructure to directly connect stablecoins with real assets.

When NASDAQ’s tokenization proposal is implemented and combined with explorations by platforms like MSX, the future financial market will no longer clearly distinguish between the “fiat world” and the “crypto world.” Liquidity friction between USDC and assets like TSLA or NVDA will be greatly reduced. For Crypto Quant, this could mean a golden era of arbitrage strategies.

From the perspective of 2025, the U.S. stock market will no longer be the single market we once knew. It is transforming into a 23-hour operational, blockchain-settled, integrated financial ecosystem that blurs the lines between public and private markets.

As Anny Liu said, these are not just minor adjustments to exchange rules but a fundamental restructuring of underlying logic. In the current era of accelerating integration between Web3 and TradFi, NASDAQ is using technology to bridge the gap. For all market participants, adapting to this “high-frequency, 24/7, tokenized” new normal will be key to survival.

2025 may well be the inaugural year of a new era for the U.S. stock market.