The Race to Build Global 24/7 Financial Markets
Last week, Jeff Yan, co-founder of Singapore-based Hyperliquid Labs, which develops a blockchain-based exchange that operates 24/7, told Bloomberg that U.S. regulators should oversee the firms that operate markets on the network. Also, San Francisco-based Ripple began offering institutional clients access to more than 100 markets on Hyperliquid.
Yan grew up in Redwood Shores, California, studied at Harvard, worked in high-frequency trading, ran a crypto trading firm and launched Hyperliquid in 2023.
He said: “allowing price discovery in the world globally on these assets that ultimately will be extremely valuable for society and will represent core parts of the economy as early as possible, and doing it in a way that is not confined to one jurisdiction, but rather just kind of a global financial system, I think, has a lot of promise.”
Hyperliquid describes itself as a “blockchain purpose-built for finance” where users can “trade crypto, commodities, indices, FX, and real-world assets.” The company says the network supports 200,000 transactions per second. In practice, traders use it to trade contracts tracking oil, gold, silver, the S&P 500 and stocks such as Tesla and Nvidia, including on nights and weekends when traditional exchanges are closed.
The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report (October 2026) found: “Unlike traditional equity markets, which operate within fixed exchange hours, tokenized equities trade on-chain around the clock, allowing investors to transact at any time and across time zones.
"The volume outside standard hours suggests that 24/7 availability is not merely a technical feature but a source of demand - particularly among investors in regions operating outside US trading hours and those seeking to react immediately to news and price movements when conventional venues are closed.”
Beau Brooks, a spokesperson for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal regulator of U.S. futures and derivatives markets, said: “If the United States fails to keep pace with rapid advances in trading and markets, we risk ceding our reputation as the global hub of financial innovation.”
OUR TAKE
Markets will keep moving toward 24/7 trading, and Hyperliquid isn’t alone: 1) recently, BNY and Citadel Securities used blockchain technology to settle a Treasury transaction in minutes, 2) Nasdaq, Robinhood and Coinbase are moving into tokenized stocks, and 3) incumbents like Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, are building their own 24/7 trading capabilities.
As U.S. regulators move to bring these markets onshore, the CFTC will have to decide whether to oversee the networks themselves or the firms that build trading businesses on them, a choice that could set the template for the industry.
Offshore platforms like Hyperliquid are already operating 24/7; the open question is how U.S. markets integrate and regulate them.