Article by: Prathik Desai
Compile: Block Unicorn
A clock is not a solution for masking latency. For decades, financial markets were built around the speed of existing information transmission. They introduced closing bells, batch settlements, and regional exchanges—reasonable in an era of slow information flow. But all of that has changed. Capital does not wait. Just as water always finds a way through cracks, capital will too. Financial gravity pulls it toward the fastest path to price information. That is the law of the market. Market participants will not tolerate inefficiency forever.
This is what I have observed over the past few weeks regarding the development of financial markets from a macro perspective.
In today’s article, I’ll help you understand what disrupted the traditional bundled structure of financial markets, transforming it into a more efficient, unbundled structure that spans different venues, formats, and timeframes.
Switch roles
I have been studying finance for over a decade. In the early stages of my learning, I always viewed traditional stock exchanges as the very definition of the market. For most of their history, stock exchanges were the gathering place for everyone and everything: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technologies that drove the market. They had indices tracking constituent stocks and clocks indicating trading hours, telling everyone when trading was allowed and when it was not.
But this situation has changed over the past few years. In fact, over the past several weeks, we have seen multiple developments confirming this shift.
On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 Index to Trade[XYZ], enabling HIP-3 market deployers to launch the first and only S&P 500 perpetual derivative contract on the Hyperliquid exchange. The S&P 500 Index is the world’s most closely watched benchmark for U.S. large-cap stocks, tracking 500 leading U.S. companies that represent approximately 80% of the total U.S. market capitalization, exceeding $61 trillion. The index covers at least half of the global equity market capitalization.
This is an index with nearly 70 years of history, listed on a market that has existed for only six months.
The day after S&P announced this news, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq’s application to trade and settle certain stocks in tokenized form. Nasdaq is one of the world’s most active trading venues, with its nominal trading volume typically exceeding that of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the world’s largest exchange by market capitalization.
On March 16, Cboe Global Markets submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch "nearly around-the-clock (24x5) U.S. stock trading." The largest operating entity behind the U.S. financial exchange stated it is prepared to offer round-the-clock stock trading as early as December 2026.
But why is this the case? An increasing number of people are calling for extended trading hours for U.S. stocks.
These three initiatives collectively address outdated bundled trading structures. Hyperliquid’s launch of the S&P 500 futures market challenges the decades-old convention that investors could only trade traditional indices through conventional markets. It also enables 24/7 global trading of one of the most closely followed large-cap indices.
Nasdaq’s tokenized stock trading initiative targets infrastructure. It introduces a new wrapper format that allows the same stock to be traded in different ways. Previous attempts at tokenized stocks have faced criticism from the industry.
Investors are questioning whether these tokens carry the same rights as the original shares.
But wouldn’t you accept it if I provided the same equity exposure through tokens on the blockchain, while still retaining the voting rights and legal protections associated with the original dematerialized shares?
Why are you doing this? What benefit does it bring to you?
What if you’re an investor outside the United States and want easier access to the world’s largest economy’s stock market? What if these tokenized stocks made it simpler to integrate them with collateral and lending systems?
These advantages are multiplied when you consider 24/7 trading.
This is what the Cboe is pushing back against. Its nearly 24/7 (five days a week, 24 hours a day) trading model aims to recognize that capital doesn’t wait for business hours. Traders always want to express their views immediately after receiving information. If Cboe doesn’t provide them with a market to express those views, traders will turn to other platforms that do.
What I'm saying isn't hypothetical, nor is it "something that might happen soon." It's happening right now, as we speak.
A future of splits
The adoption of financial product splits is most evident in Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market, which was officially launched in late October 2025.
In just the past month, the cumulative trading volume on the HIP-3 market increased by $72 billion. The cumulative trading volume over the previous four months was $78 billion.
In March, Trade[XYZ]'s perpetual markets on traditional financial instruments and stocks continued to account for 90% of HIP-3’s daily trading volume. But that’s not the most interesting part.
More than half of the trading volume for [XYZ] comes from the perpetual futures markets for silver, crude oil, Brent crude oil, and gold.
Hyperliquid offers a unified trading platform for spot cryptocurrency trading as well as perpetual contracts on cryptocurrencies and traditional assets. This not only streamlines the trading process on a single platform but also delivers higher liquidity, a unified user interface, and tighter bid-ask spreads.
Traders still want to trade some of the largest and most popular assets, including commodities, public companies, large private companies, and indices. You may want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, an index tracking the top 100 non-financial companies in the U.S., and the S&P 500—all of which can be traded on the Hyperliquid platform.
HIP-3 separates the functionality of investing in these assets from the existing exchange infrastructure while still tracking the underlying assets of their original benchmarks. Therefore, when you go long on a silver futures contract on HIP-3, the underlying asset it tracks remains tied to the value of one ounce of silver in the Pyth data source.
Traders have moved from previous platforms to trade silver on HIP-3 because HIP-3 does not distinguish between U.S. and non-U.S. traders, nor does it adhere to any specific schedule. Whenever an event arises that prompts traders to express views through asset pricing, HIP-3 provides a market for them, regardless of their geographic location or time zone.
Over the past few weeks, open interest (OI) on the Hyperliquid platform has grown significantly, fully reflecting the results mentioned above. OI measures the total value of outstanding derivative positions, and unlike trading volume, which reflects trading activity, OI reflects the level of trading commitment.
The open interest on March 1 was $1.13 billion, doubling to $2.2 billion by April 1, indicating that traders are confidently locking in funds on Hyperliquid’s perpetual contracts.
These indicators show that when market access is easier and friction is reduced, traders are not loyal to any particular platform or asset class. They choose whichever platform offers volatility, convenience, and liquidity.
This is why traditional institutions such as S&P, Nasdaq, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange are taking steps to recognize this behavior.
At least two recent events have demonstrated the importance of round-the-clock trading and market volatility for traders.
Saurabh wrote in a tweet on Decentralised.Co: "On February 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran while traditional markets were closed. Within hours, the price of oil-linked perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform surged 5% as traders rapidly absorbed the shock."
Within just two weeks after the war broke out, trading volume for oil-linked perpetual contracts surged from $200 million to a cumulative $6 billion.
A major concern with new platforms is liquidity. If liquidity is insufficient, the bid-ask spread may widen, causing traders to face worse pricing disadvantages than on other platforms.
Two weeks ago, as U.S. President Trump engaged in discussions with Iranian officials over holding "productive talks," the Hyperliquid platform demonstrated its robust liquidity. The newly launched S&P 500 futures, built on the HIP-3 platform, precisely track the movements of the CME E-mini S&P 500 futures, down to the minute.
Although the on-chain perpetual contract is approximately 50–70 points lower than ES, the magnitude of price movements is similar.
What does this mean?
For decades, traditional markets have been bundled together, controlling the venues (exchanges), times (trading hours), and products (indices/contracts).
They chose to maintain the status quo because they failed to establish mechanisms to address inefficiencies such as time delays, trading time restrictions, and regulatory limitations for non-U.S. investors. Instead, they obscured these inefficiencies and packaged them as procedural frameworks designed to build trustworthy institutions, thereby attracting investors.
People still trade and invest—not because they are foolish or gullible to the narratives promoted by traditional financial markets, but because they have no other choice. This began to change with the emergence of blockchain, which provided the world with on-chain markets, making trading and investing more accessible than ever before.
People saw this opportunity and seized it.
They didn’t care about changes in market structure in the past, and they won’t care in the future. Whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled is of no concern to them. Regardless of whether traditional institutions approve, they will embrace any new market structure that allows traders and investors to express their views more easily through financial instruments. It doesn’t matter whether this structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, or the S&P 500, or from permissionless platforms built on blockchain.
The financial industry continues to evolve and will adopt any structure that can reduce the gap between events occurring and the expression of price opinions.
Important events are happening around the world every moment. So why should prices wait until the clock in a glass-walled building in New York starts ticking on Monday morning to be determined?