London Stock Exchange Group plans to move to a 24/5 trading cycle in the first half of 2027, build a digital securities depository, issue tokenized equity products, and connect the whole stack through partnerships with Kraken and HSBC. Darko Hajdukovic of LSEG laid out the program at the European Blockchain Convention, and the outline covers nearly every layer of how a stock exchange operates, not one product bolted onto the old one.
“In the first half of next year we move to a 24/5 trading cycle, LSEG24. We’re building a digital securities depository, partnering with Kraken to list on it, and building tokenised equity tokens. We’ve also signed an MOU with HSBC on an interoperable link,” Hajdukovic said during a panel on institutional digital-market infrastructure.
What each piece does
The LSEG24 cycle extends trading across weekday nights and weekends, beyond the main session that has defined European equity trading for decades. The digital securities depository would record and settle eligible assets on digital rails rather than through the legacy settlement chain. The Kraken partnership brings a crypto-native platform into the listing process, which would be one of the more unusual alignments in the sector: a 240-year-old exchange group sharing infrastructure with an exchange that grew up in crypto. The HSBC memorandum covers an interoperable link, meaning the bank’s systems would connect to LSEG’s digital infrastructure rather than build a parallel universe of its own.
Hajdukovic did not name a launch date beyond “first half of next year” and did not specify which securities would trade through the new system first. That gap matters. Extended trading hours for a handful of liquid large-caps is a manageable project. Extending them for the whole market, with settlement and market-making that hold up overnight, is a different beast. The absence of detail suggests the sequencing is still being worked out internally.
Why exchanges are rushing toward 24/7
Pressure to extend trading hours has been building on both sides of the Atlantic. US retail brokers already offer overnight sessions, and American exchanges and regulators are weighing their own moves toward longer hours and tokenized securities. Crypto markets never close, and a generation of traders who got their first exposure to markets through bitcoin find it strange that Apple stops trading at 4 p.m. New York time. Exchanges that hold the line on hours risk watching overnight volume migrate to venues that do not.
Tokenized equities are the other half of the push, and LSEG’s approach lands in the middle of an ongoing industry argument about what a tokenized stock actually is. Some products represent beneficial interests in securities held by a custodian, making them real ownership in digital form. Others provide only contractual exposure to a price, with no claim on the underlying share. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has argued publicly that tokenized stocks should be real securities rather than synthetic price-trackers, and his company introduced Base-native tokens linked to Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet for eligible non-US customers in August. LSEG’s status as a regulated exchange group gives its version of tokenized equity a running start on the legitimacy question that pure crypto implementations have to fight for.
The settlement layer is the hard part
Extended hours are the visible change, but the depository is where the project lives or dies. European equity settlement runs on systems with decades of accumulated rules, and a market that trades 24/5 while settling on old rails creates timing mismatches that market participants will price into everything they do. The digital securities depository is LSEG’s attempt to close that gap by settling eligible assets on infrastructure designed for continuous operation. If it works, the 24/5 cycle has a foundation. If it slips, the trading-hours extension becomes a service with an asterisk.
The HSBC link points in the same direction. An interoperable connection between a major universal bank and an exchange group’s digital layer is the kind of plumbing that determines whether institutional money actually shows up. Banks will not route client flows through infrastructure they cannot reconcile with their own books, and the memorandum is an early signal that at least one large bank plans to try.
What to watch in 2027
The timeline puts the first real test inside eighteen months. Three checkpoints will tell the story. The launch scope of LSEG24, whether it starts with a narrow list of liquid names or attempts a broader market. The initial tokenized equity offering, and whether it grants genuine ownership or contractual exposure. And the depth of the Kraken integration, whether the crypto exchange merely lists on the depository or participates in liquidity provision.
London has reasons to move fast. Post-Brexit, the City has been searching for regulatory divergences that justify its claim to be a venue for innovation rather than a rule-taker, and the UK’s financial regulators have signalled openness to tokenized market infrastructure. An exchange group that ships continuous trading and digital settlement before Frankfurt or New York would give that argument concrete evidence. The project also responds to a competitive threat LSEG can see clearly: US exchanges examining longer hours, crypto platforms listing tokenized US stocks to non-US users, and brokers building overnight products while the traditional session sleeps. Whoever assembles the full stack first, continuous hours, digital settlement, and bank-grade interoperability, sets the template everyone else copies.