More than half of sampled tokenized US stock trading happens outside Wall Street's regular session, and those after-hours prices show up in the next day's conventional market open. That's the finding from an IMF study of five actively traded tokenized US equity products from Ondo and xStocks, covering S&P 500, Nasdaq, Tesla, Alphabet and Nvidia exposure across 11 trading venues.
The sample covered more than 2 million five-minute observations over 365 trading days and represented about $345 million in market value, roughly 15% of the $2.3 billion tokenized equity market as of July 31. Tokenized equities ran about 50% higher realized volatility than their traditional counterparts, and the gap widened on decentralized venues.
Where the trading actually happens
Overnight and weekend periods account for the bulk of activity. About 80% of tokenized equity transactions involved less than a single share, which points to demand for fractional exposure and round-the-clock access rather than institutional block trading.
That's the pitch the products were built on. It's also the thing that makes them interesting to regulators. An investor in Asia can buy Tesla exposure at 3 a.m. New York time. What the IMF found is that the price they pay doesn't stay contained on the tokenized venue — it shows up in the regular session the next morning.
The estimated pass-through from overnight tokenized prices to the first five minutes of the next US session runs between 87% and 99%. In other words, the overnight market isn't a sideshow. It's front-running the open, or at least reflecting information the regular session then confirms.
Thin books, big moves
Traditional exchanges remain substantially more liquid than tokenized platforms, and centralized crypto venues perform better than decentralized exchanges. On the decentralized side, the IMF notes that relatively small transactions can produce disproportionately large price movements because market depth and market-making activity are limited.
Tokenized prices generally tracked their underlying securities during regular trading hours. The deviations clustered on decentralized venues, and they got wider and more frequent when volumes were low — which is exactly when the fractional retail crowd is most active.
The systemic question
Systemic risks stay limited at current adoption levels. The IMF is careful about that. But it flags a scenario worth watching: broader use of continuous trading and automated settlement could accelerate market stress rather than absorb it.
The specific worry is automated collateral management. If a smart contract triggers margin calls and forced liquidations outside conventional trading hours, there's no closing bell to pause things. The liquidation cascade runs while the traditional market is dark and the tokenized venue is thin.
Public tokenized real-world assets excluding repo and stablecoins reached roughly $65 billion by July. Traditional capital-market assets sit near $300 trillion. The gap is the entire story — tokenized equities are a rounding error today, and the plumbing questions only matter if that changes.
What's holding it back
Four constraints show up repeatedly: legal certainty, regulatory clarity, interoperability between trading networks, and reliable settlement assets. None of those are technical problems in the crypto-native sense. They're the kind of things that get resolved in legislation and standards bodies, not in a protocol upgrade.
Until they are, the 24/7 market keeps trading fractions of a share, keeps printing prices that the New York open then validates, and keeps running hotter than the assets it tracks. The IMF's data ends July 31. Whether the pass-through holds at 87% to 99% as volumes grow is the open question — and one the next round of filings and venue data should start to answer.
