At 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, a gavel strikes a wooden block on a balcony in lower Manhattan, and the world’s largest financial engine officially goes to sleep. The screens freeze, the floor traders go home, and for the next sixteen hours—or the entire weekend—your money is essentially stuck in amber. It is a relic of a time when bankers needed to sleep and paper certificates had to be driven across town in armored trucks, yet this schedule still dictates how modern markets work. But Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, just filed plans to make that silence obsolete.
- ICE announced new 24/7 trading platform on January 19.
- Settlement delay is currently two days (“T+2”).
- Tokenized assets could grow 1,000 times by 2030.
On January 19, ICE announced it is building a new trading platform. This isn’t just a software update for the existing stock exchange. It is a completely separate venue designed to trade stocks and funds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
To do this, they aren’t just hiring more people to work the night shift. They are rebuilding the plumbing of the stock market using the technology that powers cryptocurrency: blockchain and digital tokens. It is a move that admits the crypto kids were right about the technology, even if Wall Street wants to control how it is used.
The problem with the weekend
To understand why this is a big deal, we have to look at what happens when you buy a stock today. You open your app, tap “buy,” and see the shares appear in your account instantly. It feels fast, but that is an illusion.
Behind the scenes, the actual money and the actual ownership of the stock don’t swap hands for two days. This is called “settlement.” It’s like writing a check at the grocery store on Friday evening; you walk out with the milk, but the money doesn’t actually leave your bank account until Tuesday.
This delay creates risk. If a massive crisis happens over the weekend, or if a bank fails overnight, that “pending” transaction becomes a dangerous liability. ICE wants to fix this by making settlement nearly instant.
Enter the digital chips
The new platform proposes using “tokenized” cash and assets. Think of this like a casino. When you walk into a casino, you swap your slow, clumsy cash for chips. Inside the casino, those chips move instantly across the tables. You don’t wait two days for the dealer to verify your bet.
In this new system, the “chips” are stablecoins or tokenized bank deposits. A stablecoin is a digital token that is always worth exactly one dollar. By using these tokens on a blockchain, the trade and the payment happen at the exact same second.
For those new to the concept, a blockchain is simply a shared record book. It’s like a Google Doc that everyone can read, but nobody can secretly edit or delete lines from. Because the record is shared and updates instantly, you don’t need to wait for three different banks to reconcile their ledgers on Monday morning.
The banking bottleneck
The reason we haven’t had 24/7 stock trading before isn’t because we lacked the computers. It’s because we lacked the banking support. You can trade a stock at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday, but you can’t move the dollars to pay for it because the Federal Reserve’s wire system is closed.
ICE is trying to solve this by partnering with heavy hitters like Citi and BNY (Bank of New York Mellon). These banks are working on “tokenized deposits.” This means they are creating digital versions of the money in your bank account that can move on a blockchain even when the bank branch is closed.
BNY recently announced they can mirror client deposits on a digital platform. This allows big investors to move collateral—assets put up to secure a loan—any time of day or night. It is the financial equivalent of replacing a drawbridge with a tunnel; traffic no longer has to stop just because the operator went home.
What this means for crypto
You might think this news would have cryptocurrency enthusiasts popping champagne corks. After all, the owner of the NYSE is adopting their technology. Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, called the move “bullish” for the industry.
However, there is a catch. This might be good for the technology of crypto, but not necessarily for the coins people buy and sell.
Jeff Dorman, a Chief Investment Officer at the investment firm Arca, points out a sharp contradiction. He argues that while Wall Street is adopting the tech—blockchains, tokenization, instant settlement—they aren’t necessarily buying Bitcoin or Ethereum to do it. They are building their own private lanes.
Dorman suggests the industry is facing an “existential crisis.” The old theory was the “fat protocol thesis.” This was the idea that if you bought the base layer (like Ethereum), you would capture all the value of the applications built on top of it. It’s like owning the asphalt of a highway; you get paid no matter what cars drive on it.
But if ICE and Citi build their own private highway, the public crypto networks might not see a penny of that value. Dorman believes the winners here won’t be the big general cryptocurrencies, but rather specific “DeFi” (Decentralized Finance) tokens that act as plumbing for this new system.
Think of DeFi like a bank, but instead of a building with marble floors and tellers, it’s software that runs the counters, and the users earn the fees. If Wall Street moves on-chain, the software that helps move that money could become very valuable.
The plumbing is getting an upgrade
This move by ICE isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)—a massive, invisible entity that handles the paperwork for almost every stock trade in America—is also moving toward tokenization.
Last December, the DTCC got a green light from regulators to test a tokenization service. They are starting with safe, boring assets like U.S. Treasury bonds. This is a classic strategy: start with the safest things, prove the pipes don’t leak, and then start pumping the riskier stocks through the system.
Asset management firm Grayscale believes this shift is inevitable. They project that tokenized assets could grow 1,000 times larger by 2030.
“This growth will likely drive value to the blockchains that process transactions in tokenized assets, as well as a variety of supporting applications.”
The road ahead
The project still needs approval from regulators, which is never a sure thing. The government is understandably nervous about letting the financial markets run on autopilot without the traditional safety breaks.
However, the direction of travel is clear. We live in a world where information moves instantly, but money moves at the speed of a donkey cart. ICE, along with the biggest banks in the world, has decided it is finally time to upgrade the cart to a Ferrari.
For the average investor, this eventually means the concept of “market hours” will disappear. The stock market will become like the internet: a place that never closes, never sleeps, and settles its debts the moment you click the button.
