Driven by the need to manage risk outside of traditional exchange hours and the desire for greater capital efficiency, major banks and hedge funds are moving towards “always-on” digital infrastructure.
The world of finance is undergoing a fundamental transformation as Wall Street institutions increasingly embrace perpetual futures contracts and tokenised real-world assets to navigate a 24/7 global economy.
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According to industry experts, the elimination of contract expiry dates and the advent of instantaneous “atomic” settlement are redefining market relevance, particularly as crypto-native platforms continue to lead price discovery during geopolitical crises that increasingly occur during the weekend.
The convergence of these technologies suggests that the boundary between traditional finance and blockchain-based infrastructure is narrowing.
Wall Street desks, multi-strategy allocators and macro funds are now actively exploring these digital-native structures because they solve deep-seated operational problems inherent in standard expiry-dated contracts.
This transition is not merely a technological upgrade but a response to how global markets now function in real-time.
The Chief Investment Officer at Theo, Iggy Ioppe, explained to Euronews that the move toward 24/7 operations is no longer optional.
Theo builds financial products to address this new demand and is partnered with major financial institutions such as the British multinational bank Standard Chartered.
“It is not a matter of preference, it is becoming a matter of structural necessity. We saw this clearly during the Strait of Hormuz closure. Traditional markets were dark over the weekend and tokenised gold and oil were the only transparent, continuously trading venues reflecting real-time safe-haven demand,” Ioppe stated.
Speaking to Euronews, Andrei Grachev, Managing Partner of DWF Labs, a leading crypto market maker, also highlighted the significance of these events for the broader market.
“The clearest example was 28 February this year. US and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities were announced on a Saturday morning, and every major commodity exchange, CME, NYMEX, ICE, was closed. Traders immediately moved to decentralised perpetual futures platforms for oil, gold, and silver,” Grachev explained.
When traditional venues eventually reopened, they were forced to catch up to price levels that had already been established on-chain, highlighting a shift in where primary price formation occurs.
An IMF report on tokenised finance published this month also highlighted that the transition to digital-native assets represents a “structural reconfiguration” of the global financial infrastructure.
Authored by Tobias Adrian, the study warns that while atomic settlement and programmability significantly enhance capital efficiency, they also eliminate the temporal buffers that banks and regulators rely on during periods of market stress.
The report argues that for these markets to scale safely and avoid dangerous fragmentation, they must be grounded in a “public anchor” of trust, specifically through the implementation of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).
Without such sovereign settlement assets, the IMF cautions that the extreme speed of tokenised systems could cause liquidity crises to materialise instantly, potentially leading to cascading liquidations that outpace the ability of human authorities to intervene.
“The market infrastructure supporting always-on tokenised trading is still catching up to the demands it creates, and that gap between product capability and operational readiness is one of the more underappreciated risks in the space right now,” Grachev told Euronews.
What are tokenised real-world assets?
Real-world assets, often abbreviated as RWAs in the financial world, are essentially any physical or traditional assets that exist outside of the digital blockchain space.
This includes gold and other metals, real estate, oil and other commodities, as well as financial products like government bonds and shares in companies.
In the context of modern markets, these assets are being “tokenised”, which means their value and ownership rights are digitised into a virtual token on a blockchain. It is perhaps helpful to think of this like a digital receipt that lives on a secure and global ledger, representing a specific fraction or the whole of the asset.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has been one of the most vocal proponents of this technological shift, stating in his 2026 annual letter to investors that “tokenisation could help accelerate the future by updating the plumbing of the financial system and making investments easier to issue, easier to trade and easier to access.”
To back this vision, BlackRock has moved aggressively into the space with the launch of its BUIDL fund, which tokenises US Treasuries on a public blockchain and has already scaled to around $3 billion (€2.54bn) in assets under management.
What are perpetual futures contracts?
A perpetual futures contract is a way to bet on the future price of an asset, without ever actually owning it and, crucially, without ever having to settle by a specific deadline.
In a standard futures contract, you are essentially making a deal that must be closed or renewed on a set date in the calendar, much like a lease ending. A “perpetual” contract removes that expiry date entirely, allowing you to keep your position endlessly.
While holding the contract, a “funding rate” is applied, which typically has to be paid hourly. This funding rate is either positive or negative, depending on whether there are more long or short positions open. If positive, longs pay shorts, if negative, shorts pay longs, making the rate a balancing mechanism.
Fundamentally, holding a perpetual futures contract is a way of synthetically holding the underlying asset.
The scale of this market is already substantial, with global notional volume for perpetual futures exceeding $60 billion (€50.9bn) per day. As regulatory frameworks catch up, particularly in the US, the influx of institutional capital is expected to accelerate.
Speaking to Euronews, Fabian Dori, Chief Investment Officer at Sygnum, a global Swiss-based digital asset banking group, explained that “institutional adoption of perpetuals will ultimately depend on the regulatory and custodial infrastructure surrounding them, as well as liquidity and pricing conditions.”
This new instrument enables markets to be always open as it allows for continuous trading even when spot markets are closed, but also demands “atomic settlement” meaning the need for trades to be funded and settled in real time.
In traditional finance, the T+1 or T+2 settlement cycle provides a temporal buffer, dictating that the transfer of securities and the corresponding payment must be completed by the next 1-2 business days, effectively giving market makers time to source inventory and manage counterparty exposure.
Atomic settlement collapses this window to zero, requiring assets to be in position before or at the exact moment a trade occurs. While this reduces counterparty duration risk, it creates massive and sudden peak liquidity demands that must be managed through automation and sophisticated treasury models.
Currently, the settlement of perpetual futures contracts on blockchains is entirely done with privately issued stablecoins, which the IMF considers a risk in its latest report.
To address it, the IMF has suggested the need for a “public anchor” such as CBDCs, to provide a safe and programmable settlement asset that is issued by a central bank.
Beyond settlement, the infrastructure for price data remains a critical concern. Providing liquidity around the clock requires high-quality oracles and data feeds that do not lag or become stale when traditional markets close.
“Price data infrastructure is arguably the most critical unsolved challenge in 24/7 tokenised markets. When you are providing liquidity continuously across decentralised and regulated venues, the quality, latency, and reliability of your price feeds directly determine your P&L and your risk exposure,” Ioppe pointed out to Euronews.
As regulated competition enters the “always-on” space, crypto-native platforms are being forced to upgrade their standards. The implementation of the GENIUS Act in the US is already accelerating the trend of institutional capital moving toward venues that offer both innovation and governance.
Andrei Grachev believes that the long-term winners will be those who embrace these standards.
“The platforms that stay relevant will be the ones that use that speed to actually improve their standards rather than simply outpace regulation. As institutional allocations increase, compliance infrastructure will increasingly determine which venues attract meaningful capital and which do not,” Grachev concluded.
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