The SEC spent Thursday working through a question that used to belong only to crypto: what happens when markets never close. A roundtable at the agency’s Washington headquarters brought together more than seventeen firms, including NYSE, Nasdaq, BlackRock, Citadel Securities, Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, DTCC and Schwab, to discuss moving US equities toward 24-hour trading.
The event ran from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and came an hour after the same agency issued its order approving a five-year exemption for tokenized US stock trading on blockchain venues. The pairing was not a coincidence. Chairman Paul Atkins has tied the two efforts together, arguing that tokenization and extended hours are the same modernization project seen from different ends.
“We are moving towards a new day – and night – in the U.S. equity markets,” Atkins said when the roundtable was announced. He argued that expanded overnight trading would align US exchange hours with venues overseas, potentially drawing more global capital to American markets and letting investors react to events faster, reducing the risk that accumulates overnight or over a weekend.
Where the industry actually is
Extended hours trading is taking shape as what Commissioner Hester Peirce called a 23-hour, five-day trading week, not a true 24/7 market. The 24X National Exchange, whose registration the SEC approved nearly two years ago, is the furthest along, and Thursday’s roundtable answered a call Peirce and Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw made when that approval went through. A SIFMA roundtable earlier this year covered some of the same ground from the industry side.
The industry has already moved on some infrastructure. Atkins noted a plan to establish overnight price bands, requiring all trading centers active during overnight hours to maintain written procedures preventing trades outside those bands. Work is also underway to prepare the Securities Information Processor plans for overnight price dissemination, the consolidated data feed that retail platforms and news services rely on.
What remains is harder. Panel one covered exchange and broker-dealer readiness, overnight surveillance, closing price processes and settlement changes. Panel two took up operational resiliency: systems readiness, failover, capacity planning, cybersecurity and staffing for overnight shifts. Panel three discussed liquidity, capital formation and what regulators are calling Day 2 questions, the market structure changes that follow once continuous trading exists. The panelist list itself tells the story of who bears the burden: market makers like Virtu and Jane Street, custodians like BNY Pershing and State Street, exchanges, and the data infrastructure firm Exegy.
The problems nobody has solved
Peirce’s remarks laid out the uncomfortable parts. Back-office operations, overnight batch processing and critical IT maintenance that used to get a full night now have to compress into roughly a single hour. Supervision and surveillance of trading during hours when almost nobody is watching is an open problem. Broker-dealers owe customers best execution, but overnight liquidity is dispersed and spreads are wide, which makes that obligation harder to satisfy than it is at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
She also asked whether issuers should monitor trading in their own shares overnight in case of extreme moves, a duty that has never existed because the shares did not trade overnight.
She also pointed at the comparison the whole exercise implies. “Crypto markets certainly do not sleep,” she noted, adding that index options already trade overnight and futures follow a 23/5 schedule similar to where equities are headed. The question she posed to the panel was blunt: what mistakes from those markets should equities avoid repeating?
The answer matters because crypto’s 24/7 structure has well-documented failure modes. Thin weekend liquidity amplifies flash crashes. Manipulation is easier when volume is low and surveillance staffing is thin. Exchange outages at 3 a.m. strand traders with no support desk. Equities regulators want the availability without inheriting the pathologies, and the roundtable’s operational focus suggests they know the difference lives in staffing and systems, not in the idea itself.
Why crypto is the reference point
The connection runs deeper than rhetoric. Tokenized stocks, the product the SEC approved the day before, trade on blockchain rails that run continuously by design. If US equities are going to settle and trade around the clock, the plumbing being built for tokenized securities is one of the candidate foundations. The same day’s decisions feed each other: exemption for the venues, roundtable for the market-wide rules.
For crypto-native firms, the irony is straightforward. Crypto spent a decade being told its always-on market was a defect, unsuitable for serious finance. The world’s largest securities regulator is now studying that always-on market as a model for the biggest equity market on earth, with the caveat that it wants the uptime without the weekend crashes.
For retail brokers like Robinhood, which already offers overnight sessions and lobbied for exactly this, the roundtable is a green light. For exchanges, it is a competitive threat, since NYSE and Nasdaq currently profit from owning the only hours that count. Asset managers sit in the middle: BlackRock’s presence on the panels reflects a world where its ETFs need continuous pricing once the underlying market never sleeps.
What comes next
No rule changes were proposed Thursday. The SEC framed the event as preparation, gathering operational input from exchanges, clearinghouses and market makers before drafting anything. A recording will be posted on SEC.gov. The practical signal is that the agency expects near-continuous equity trading to arrive in stages, starting with the 23/5 model, with tokenized venues potentially running longer hours under their own exemption sooner.
The direction of travel is clear regardless of timeline. US markets are moving toward the schedule crypto has always run, and the two market structures are converging from opposite ends: crypto adding compliance, equities adding hours.