The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the infrastructure required to support near-continuous equity trading as exchanges and financial institutions prepare for longer market hours. The September 17 roundtable focuses on exchange and broker readiness, clearing and settlement, overnight surveillance, market resiliency and investor protection as U.S. equities move toward 24-hour trading.
According to the SEC’s official Sunshine Act notice, the public session runs from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET at the agency’s Washington headquarters. Chairman Paul Atkins, SEC commissioners and Trading and Markets Director Jamie Selway are participating, with representatives from BlackRock, Robinhood and NYSE on the first panel and Nasdaq and DTCC represented during the resiliency discussion.
Market Infrastructure Faces a 24-Hour Test
The first panel examines what exchanges and broker-dealers still need before extended trading can operate reliably. Topics include overnight liquidity, surveillance, closing-price processes, clearance and settlement changes and investor protections, while the second panel addresses system capacity, cybersecurity, failover infrastructure, market-data continuity and shorter maintenance windows.
Blockchain is not the formal focus of the roundtable, but tokenization increasingly intersects with the same market-structure questions. The SEC proposed modernized transfer-agent rules on September 1 that explicitly recognize electronic recordkeeping and blockchain technology in securities issuance and share transfers. The proposal represents the first substantive overhaul of those rules in decades and remains open for public comment through November 3.
Private-sector infrastructure is developing in parallel. Nasdaq Ventures agreed this month to invest $100 million in Kraken parent Payward while the companies develop Nasdaq Equity Tokens. Nasdaq currently targets the second quarter of 2027 for launching its NET framework, linking tokenized equities with infrastructure designed for always-on markets.
The expansion comes as tokenization moves deeper into liquid financial assets. Recent growth in tokenized U.S. Treasury products illustrates that blockchain settlement is already extending beyond crypto-native assets, although growth in tokenized products does not itself establish readiness for continuous trading across the broader U.S. equity market.
Settlement Infrastructure Moves Into Production
DTCC has also moved beyond testing concepts. On July 15, DTC successfully tokenized securities already held in custody and used them in real production transactions, following development work with more than 50 financial firms. DTCC plans to launch the broader Tokenization Service in October.
That development advances the kind of settlement infrastructure highlighted in a recent multi-blockchain tokenization initiative involving DTCC. Continuous trading creates operational requirements beyond simply keeping an exchange open, including collateral mobility, clearing availability, overnight surveillance and systems capable of functioning with much smaller maintenance windows.
Some of those concepts are already operating at institutional scale in financing markets. Broadridge reported that its distributed-ledger repo platform processed an average of $351 billion per day during August, providing another example of how tokenized repo infrastructure is changing market plumbing. The technology demonstrates that blockchain-based settlement can operate at substantial scale, but equities introduce separate requirements around issuers, shareholder rights, surveillance and market continuity.
The SEC roundtable does not itself establish new trading rules. Its immediate purpose is to identify what market infrastructure must change as U.S. equities move toward near-continuous trading, with the final panel examining liquidity, capital formation and potential future expansion toward full 24×7 markets.
