Gracy Chen is chief executive of Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange that lists tokenised stocks and equity perpetuals. In this contributed piece she argues that price discovery is moving to venues that never close, and that traditional markets will have to respond. The views are her own.

There is a choreography to earnings season that everyone in finance knows by heart. A company reports after the closing bell. Analysts and reporters spend the evening pulling the numbers apart. The rest of us wait for the next morning, when the market opens, and the stock finally moves. That sequence has organised professional investing for decades, and it rests on one quiet assumption: that between the report and the open, nothing can really trade.

That assumption is no longer true, and I don’t think most of Wall Street has noticed.

The same household names, Apple, Nvidia and Tesla, now trade around the clock. Tokenised versions of them, and the derivatives that track them, can now change hands at 2am on a Sunday as well as at 2pm on a Tuesday. So when a company reports at 4.05pm, and its guidance disappoints, the repricing no longer waits politely for the next session. It starts immediately, somewhere in the world, on a venue that never closed.

I can put a number on it. Over the weekend of 13 July, big geopolitical news broke while US exchanges were dark. On our platform, trading in tokenised stocks ran more than ten times a normal week, led by tokenised Nvidia.

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