IMF: More Than Half of Tokenized US Stock Trades Now Happen After Wall Street Closes
The IMF's latest Global Financial Stability Report shows over 50% of tokenized equity volume trades outside the 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern session. Overnight prices are bleeding into the next US open with 87% to 99% pass-through, but volatility runs 1.5x higher than the real thing.
Asia moves first, and now there's data to prove it. The IMF's October Global Financial Stability Report found that more than half of tokenized US stock trading happens outside Wall Street's regular 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern session, with heavy volume flowing through overnight and weekend windows.
The study looked at five of the most actively traded tokenized products from Ondo and xStocks, covering the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Tesla, Alphabet and Nvidia. That's $345 million in market value, or 15% of the $2.3 billion tokenized equity market as of July 31. The researchers pulled over 2 million five-minute price and volume observations across 11 venues over 365 trading days. That's not a small sample.
Roughly 80% of transactions were smaller than one share. That's a retail market, and it's a market that can't wait for New York to open its doors.
Here's the part that matters most. Overnight tokenized prices contained information that showed up in traditional markets the next morning. The pass-through estimate ran 87% to 99% during the first five minutes of the US session. That's a strong link. It doesn't prove on-chain trading causes the move, since both venues may just be pricing the same headlines. But it does mean the 24-hour market isn't noise anymore.
The quality gap is real though. Realized volatility on tokenized equities ran about 1.5 times their traditional counterparts, and it's worse on decentralized venues where thin depth lets small orders swing prices hard. Liquidity on traditional exchanges is still far deeper. Centralized crypto venues held up better than DEXs, but neither matches Nasdaq depth.
Now scale. Public tokenized real-world assets sat near $65 billion in July against roughly $300 trillion in traditional capital markets. Small. The IMF says systemic risk is limited at these levels, but it warns that automated collateral management could fire margin calls and forced liquidations at 3 a.m. with nobody on the desk to catch it.
So watch the venues that already run 24/7. They don't need Wall Street's permission. The capital isn't leaving crypto. It's leaving your jurisdiction.