UPDATED: THE NYSE SAYS ITS 24-HOUR PLAN WAS SHAPED BY WATCHING BITCOIN NEVER CLOSE — THE SEC FILLS 27 SEATS IN A ROOM ON SEPTEMBER 17 TO WORK OUT HOW — SAME DAY THE BANK OF JAPAN SITS DOWN TO RAISE RATES
On September 17 the SEC will fill 27 seats in a room in Washington and talk about making the stock market run all night. Three panels, nine chairs each. BlackRock. Citadel Securities. The NYSE. Nasdaq. Robinhood. Schwab. DTCC. Cboe. Jane Street. State Street. Citi. UBS. BNP Paribas. Virtu. Invesco. Interactive Brokers. FINRA. And Samsung, which does not run a stock exchange and is on the second panel anyway. Ten in the morning until four, open to the public, live-streamed. Chairman Paul Atkins says he is “excited at the prospect of U.S. equity markets aligning with those markets that already trade continuously.” Read that line again. The head of the SEC is describing the American stock market catching up to crypto's clock, and he is saying it like a goal.
Buried in the coverage is the sentence that makes this worth your time. NYSE executives said their extended-hours plan was “shaped partly by watching how bitcoin and crypto markets simply never close.” The oldest exchange in America, explaining that it got the idea from the thing it spent a decade declining to take seriously.
London is doing the same work the same week. The exchange and Payward, which owns Kraken, are turning 100 of the biggest UK companies into tokens — digital claims held one-for-one against the real shares — and pointing them at LSE 24, the exchange's around-the-clock venue, if regulators agree. Payward's co-chief executive: “The real opportunity is what happens when they run on the same rails.”
The same day, a firm called Ondo asked the SEC and the CFTC to let contracts that never expire — perpetual futures on single American stocks — move onshore, and argued no new rule is needed to allow it: “Nothing in the statutory definition of a security futures product requires a fixed expiration date.” Contracts that never end, on a market that never closes. Both asks landed the same week.
Now put a calendar next to it. That roundtable falls on the day the Bank of Japan opens the meeting where it is expected to raise rates, holding 517.7 trillion yen of the bonds it will mark down. One day after the Fed. Inside the window where the Treasury is buying its own long end back. In the same week the market decides what money costs on two continents, the SEC convenes Wall Street to discuss adopting bitcoin's opening hours.
Watch who is in that room, because they are the ones who get paid when the market never shuts: the market makers, the exchanges, the clearing houses. More hours, more trades, more spread. That is a fine business and it is not a monetary reform.
They can copy the hours. Anyone can run a server at three in the morning. What is not on the agenda, in Washington or London, is the part that actually made bitcoin different: nobody can vote to make more of it. Twenty-one million was never a trading schedule. Maximalist.
Buried in the coverage is the sentence that makes this worth your time. NYSE executives said their extended-hours plan was “shaped partly by watching how bitcoin and crypto markets simply never close.” The oldest exchange in America, explaining that it got the idea from the thing it spent a decade declining to take seriously.
London is doing the same work the same week. The exchange and Payward, which owns Kraken, are turning 100 of the biggest UK companies into tokens — digital claims held one-for-one against the real shares — and pointing them at LSE 24, the exchange's around-the-clock venue, if regulators agree. Payward's co-chief executive: “The real opportunity is what happens when they run on the same rails.”
The same day, a firm called Ondo asked the SEC and the CFTC to let contracts that never expire — perpetual futures on single American stocks — move onshore, and argued no new rule is needed to allow it: “Nothing in the statutory definition of a security futures product requires a fixed expiration date.” Contracts that never end, on a market that never closes. Both asks landed the same week.
Now put a calendar next to it. That roundtable falls on the day the Bank of Japan opens the meeting where it is expected to raise rates, holding 517.7 trillion yen of the bonds it will mark down. One day after the Fed. Inside the window where the Treasury is buying its own long end back. In the same week the market decides what money costs on two continents, the SEC convenes Wall Street to discuss adopting bitcoin's opening hours.
Watch who is in that room, because they are the ones who get paid when the market never shuts: the market makers, the exchanges, the clearing houses. More hours, more trades, more spread. That is a fine business and it is not a monetary reform.
They can copy the hours. Anyone can run a server at three in the morning. What is not on the agenda, in Washington or London, is the part that actually made bitcoin different: nobody can vote to make more of it. Twenty-one million was never a trading schedule. Maximalist.
BITCOIN.COM · Wed Sep 2 · SEC roundtable Sep 17, 10 AM-4 PM ET · + LSEG/PAYWARD Sep 2 · + COINTELEGRAPH on August ETF flows · + COINDESK Sep 2 · + BITCOIN.COM Sep 2 full 27-seat attendee list · + COINTELEGRAPH Sep 2 on Ondo perpetuals