A panel at last week’s Wyoming SALT conference reached quick agreement that around the clock trading is coming. The more useful message was that trading itself is not the hard part. Whether markets can run on a Saturday depends on the collateral behind each trade and the cash that settles it moving at the same speed, and that plumbing is still being built.
Tradeweb chief product officer Chris Bruner put the case bluntly. He said people ask whether you even need blockchain rails for 24/7 trading, and in theory you don’t because you could keep settling on a Monday. But he argued that in reality you absolutely do, “because of the repo markets and because of needing programmable collateral.” Blockchain is the post trade plumbing that enables 24/7 trading. It was never going to be the trading venue itself, not at TradFi volumes.
Digital Asset and Canton Network co-founder Yuval Rooz sized the opportunity. He estimated there is around $40 trillion of eligible collateral sitting idle across jurisdictions, unusable where it is needed because it cannot move fast enough. A balance sheet in Tokyo cannot easily fund trading in New York and get back before Asian hours reopen. Mobilizing it is the point of the tokenization work with DTCC on US Treasuries and equities, and the JGB project with Mizuho, MUFG and JSCC.
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