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

One day, all assets will be tokenized.

Written by: WallStreetBets

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Over the past decade, the cryptocurrency industry has built a trading system for native crypto assets: spot exchanges, perpetual contracts, stablecoins, lending protocols, and meme coin ecosystems are all in place. This has cultivated a whole generation of users who are accustomed to trading markets that allow entry at any time, global liquidity, and are not bound by the 4 PM closing time of U.S. stocks.

In my view, the next super track for the cryptocurrency industry is to migrate traditional physical assets to the blockchain. Stocks, U.S. Treasury bonds, mutual funds, gold, crude oil, and credit products will all be on-chain.

Assets like gold and Nvidia do not require additional explanation; the real transformative opportunity lies in changing the channels for asset trading, trading hours, and various operational methods after purchasing assets.

The financing and secondary market trends of SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, have already demonstrated a new model of asset circulation. The same asset can generate liquidity simultaneously in traditional brokerages, private markets, and crypto platforms. Traditional brokerages accept IPO subscription intentions, private platforms open early shares to qualified investors, and the crypto track launches perpetual contracts and tokenized products related to SpaceX's IPO, matching traders' expectations for the stock's opening price.

Some early derivatives could not meet market demand due to insufficient underlying circulation shares. Traders moved between brokerages, private placements, perpetual contracts, and tokenized products just to gain exposure to relevant assets.

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

Stablecoins have already completed the on-chain migration of the U.S. dollar, allowing funds to circulate freely globally, even during bank holidays. Now, stocks, funds, and commodities are developing along the same path.

Why has the wave of tokenization erupted now?

For many years, asset tokenization has remained at the conceptual level. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once compared the traditional financial system to postal mail, while tokenization is like email. Subsequently, BlackRock launched the BUIDL fund, with underlying assets consisting of cash, U.S. short-term Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements. Investors hold tokens worth a stable $1, with returns distributed in the form of new tokens, and compliant investors can transfer holdings between on-chain wallets.

Franklin Templeton has already deployed the infrastructure for government money market funds on-chain, with the product named BENJI. Now, BENJI is further expanding its business, collaborating with multiple banks and digital asset platforms to conduct trading and collateral financing.

These underlying asset categories already exist; tokenization changes the way asset ownership is registered, the speed of holding transfers, and the reusable 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, with tokens supporting uninterrupted trading five days a week.

Plume Network focuses on the asset issuance end, providing asset management institutions with one-stop on-chain asset infrastructure, eliminating the need for institutions to build an entire system from scratch.

TheoriqAI is positioned above the issuance layer, building various investment strategies and putting tokenized assets into on-chain lending and vault appreciation scenarios.

A few years ago, the industry was still debating whether large traditional financial institutions would adopt public chains; today, the answer is clear: major institutions have already implemented practices.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev recently stated that the biggest opportunity in the crypto industry is not to create more native cryptocurrencies but to become the underlying infrastructure for physical assets. Tokenizing stocks, futures, and private market assets is the intersection of traditional finance and crypto.

Robinhood's major push into tokenization has also brought this topic out of the crypto circle and into the public eye.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has stated that he has been closely following the tokenization track for many years: "The core highlight is not the tokens themselves, but the significant reduction in trading friction."

This is also the core reason why the topic of tokenization is rapidly heating up. The market is not chasing the concept of "tokenization" but rather a new financial product with zero friction. The focus of industry discussions has shifted from "Can assets be tokenized?" to "Which tokenized products can retain long-term users?"

Asset tokenization is technically feasible; the real challenge is to retain users continuously.

Hyperliquid Proves 24/7 Trading is a Market Necessity

HyperliquidX confirms that traders will actively flock to efficient, highly liquid, year-round trading platforms.

Perpetual contracts are the first category to be implemented, as they are synthetic assets that do not require solving custody, clearing, and various compliance legal issues all at once, allowing for quick listing of assets.

The process of putting physical assets on-chain is more complicated, as custody, clearing, and regulatory rules from various countries need to be matched and implemented.

The perpetual contract market has already validated traders' strong demand for 24/7 uninterrupted trading, and the industry has begun to explore more market structures that can be migrated to the chain.

Synapse Protocol is building the underlying layer for options trading. Its portfolio margin system allows market makers to use Hyperliquid perpetual contract holdings as margin for option sellers, hedging against underlying asset price volatility risks. This mechanism is particularly friendly to emerging assets. Hypercall has launched SPCX options, supporting intraday and same-day expiration contracts, providing trading exposure that cannot be achieved on Nasdaq.

Ondo Finance has expanded this model to the public market. Ondo Global Markets connects tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs to crypto wallets, using stablecoins as the trading medium; Ondo Perps provides traders with 24/7 leveraged exposure, relying on the Ondo ONE system.

Crypto users are already familiar with this operational logic: deposit stablecoins, choose the asset, and complete the transaction. The existing challenge in the industry is that once tokenized assets are deposited into wallets, sufficient liquidity and diverse appreciation scenarios need to be built to retain users.

Stocks, the Most Accessible Consumer-Level Tokenized Assets

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

Robinhood first launched U.S. stock and ETF tokens for EU users, and later developed its own public chain, upgrading its business from trading stock tokens within the app to a foundational network that supports the circulation of various on-chain assets. Robinhood has also successfully pushed stock tokens to a vast number of retail investors outside the crypto circle.

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

Bitget is a representative case that intuitively showcases 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 claims that rToken addresses multiple pain points in the industry: direct connection to Nasdaq and NYSE liquidity, 1:1 pegging to underlying assets, synchronized corporate dividends, and the entire clearing process completed within the Bitget ecosystem.

rNVDA and rTSLA are the most intuitive examples: the well-known Nvidia and Tesla stocks are no longer held in traditional brokerage accounts but are included in crypto trading accounts.

Ordinary investors can also buy Nvidia and Tesla through traditional apps, with the main change being the storage scenario after asset purchase. In traditional brokerage accounts, stock assets are isolated within the brokerage's own system; in crypto exchange accounts, compliant stock tokens can share a common pool of funds with spot, margin, grid trading, copy trading, and wealth management products, with dividends automatically converted to USDT credited to the account balance.

Holdings are directly counted as available trading funds rather than being isolated in brokerage accounts.

Bitget believes that when stock tokens coexist with crypto spot, collateral, and various derivatives in one account, the utility value of the assets will be significantly enhanced.

Bitget executive Gracy 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 usage scenarios for assets within crypto accounts.

The crypto trading app Fomo is even closer to ordinary users, integrating exposure to crypto assets and physical assets into the same mobile trading interface, primarily responsible for product distribution and asset exposure, without participating in asset issuance and underlying trading infrastructure.

RWA Ecosystem on Solana

In six months, the Sunrise protocol has facilitated over $3.5 billion in transaction volume for physical assets on Solana, with 14 million transactions covering approximately 221,000 wallet addresses.

Sunrise leverages the Wormhole native token transfer framework to deploy designated assets from issuers to Solana. Wallets, aggregators, and liquidity platforms can uniformly connect to the same asset address without needing to split multiple wrapped versions to divert liquidity.

The SPCX tokenized product perfectly exemplifies this operational logic. Backpack Securities is responsible for securities compliance issuance; on the day of SpaceX's Nasdaq listing, Sunrise simultaneously deployed its tokens to the Solana chain. Within the first 24 hours of launch, the asset traded over $50 million across 51 trading markets on Solana, with transaction volume exceeding $100 million within four days.

Backpack handles securities compliance and user asset access, while Sunrise connects traders, liquidity, and cross-chain routing within the Solana ecosystem. The cycle from asset issuance to trading has been significantly shortened, but whether the underlying assets can maintain trading volume ultimately depends on market demand.

Commodities: A Bridge Between Institutions and Retail Investors

U.S. Treasury bonds are the most successful category of real-world assets (RWA) for institutions, with the core advantage being the ability to generate stable returns on-chain; stocks are the optimal assets for retail investors, with widespread appeal for companies like Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and the S&P 500; commodities lie somewhere in between. Institutions use them for hedging risks, collateral reserves, real industry layouts, and macro asset allocation.

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

Physical commodities have extremely high holding thresholds, ETFs simplify the brokerage purchasing process, and futures are open to professional traders. Tokenization introduces a third path, allowing assets to circulate outside traditional trading hours, with faster settlement speeds, and can be directly used in various on-chain financial markets.

Not all commodities are suitable for on-chain representation. Crude oil has different benchmarks, storage locations, delivery contracts, and quality standards; copper and natural gas also face challenges with physical delivery. Gold has the lowest threshold, with global circulation, ample liquidity, and unified pricing systems, and has long been widely traded through ETFs and futures, with PAXG and XAUT proving that users are willing to hold on-chain gold.

Currently, the mainstay of the on-chain RWA market remains U.S. Treasury bonds, which have a simple and clear product logic: holding short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, with returns distributed to token holders.

The scale of commodities on-chain is still relatively small, but the size of the offline spot market is enormous.

Gold is an excellent test case to verify whether tokenization can optimize the trading, circulation, and revenue distribution models of commodities, rather than merely adding a digital certificate for the underlying asset.

GLDY: A Tokenized Gold Product with Yield Functionality

As a millennium-old store of value, most forms of holding gold do not generate cash flow returns. The design concept of GLDY directly addresses this pain point: holding gold tokens also allows for earning additional gold returns.

Each token corresponds to 1 ounce of standard physical gold reserves. Streamex states that the expected dividends will be distributed in incremental gold, with returns sourced from gold leasing business; current data from Streamex's website shows a total gold reserve of 3096.6072 ounces.

Custodied gold can be leased to compliant enterprises in the gold industry chain, including refineries, mints, and jewelry manufacturers, with lessees paying rental fees in gold, and the returns redistributed to token holders.

The vast majority of tokenized gold products only provide digital custody; GLDY adds a layer of value through gold leasing, forming a completely different revenue model, distinct from merely hoarding coins in a wallet.

Like all tokenized assets, the survival of the product depends on a complete trading ecosystem: holders need reserve verification, regular dividends, compliant trading channels, and a clear understanding of the source of returns.

The platform's Q1 2026 financial report shows that GLDY's quarter-end assets under management are approximately $14 million, with gold reserves of 3096 ounces; the first two monthly dividends have cumulatively distributed 10.48 ounces of gold to users. Orca and Wintermute are its foundational infrastructure partners.

The platform has partnered with Siebert Financial and tZERO to connect traditional brokerage channels. Siebert's wealth management and institutional clients can participate in GLDY through their existing brokerage accounts, while tZERO provides custody services based on a compliant digital securities platform. Siebert manages over $20 billion in assets, establishing a broad distribution channel outside the crypto sphere.

The parent company, Streamex, is listed on NASDAQ under the stock code STEX, allowing secondary market investors to directly hold equity in the platform. In July of this year, the company's board approved a stock buyback plan of up to 10 million shares, with a buyback cap price of $2, as management believes the current stock price severely undervalues the business.

This ecosystem is fully equipped: Orca provides a secondary trading market, Wintermute offers liquidity as a market maker, Chainlink reserves data oracles to verify gold inventory, Aurum handles the underlying data, and Siebert connects traditional wealth management client channels.

I continuously track three core metrics: the scale of gold reserves, the total amount of monthly dividends, and whether secondary market trading volume can grow steadily in sync. This is also the ultimate test standard for all tokenized assets.

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

Long-term Observation Focus

I do not believe that the tokenization of physical assets will lead to a one-sided bull market. I am more interested in innovative products that can fundamentally change the way underlying assets are used.

For stocks, I want to see if traders will continue to use tokenized versions when the traditional market is closed, and whether these positions will play a role in their other investment portfolios.

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

Commodities are the experimental field I am most focused on. Holding gold tokens in a wallet is easy to understand, but the real challenge is providing enough reasons for users to abandon ETFs and traditional futures in favor of on-chain gold tokens.

Will users still be trading a month later? Can assets be freely transferred across platforms? Will dividend returns grow in sync with the underlying reserves? If the answers to these questions are all affirmative, then a truly mature market can be considered to have formed.

Five years ago, the industry debated whether traditional financial institutions would accept public chains; today, the financial market is gradually adopting crypto technology as a foundational infrastructure.

If this trend continues, one day, all assets will be tokenized.

Traditional markets have fixed closing times, while crypto markets operate year-round without breaks.