On February 3rd, Ondo Finance, a platform for tokenizing real-world assets, announced the launch of its “Ondo Global Listing” service, claiming it could bring U.S. stocks onto the chain in “near real-time” at the same time as their IPO, enabling open trading on various blockchains from the first day of listing.

This move not only attempts to eliminate the “IPO time difference” between Wall Street and the crypto world but also demonstrates its ambition to transform from an “intermediary” to a “digital underwriter,” with over $2.50B in assets under management and $9.00B in cumulative transaction volume. However, no matter how high-profile or transformative Ondo is, it is only a “downstream breakthrough” initiated by a crypto-native protocol. The upper limit of the U.S. stock tokenization wave is still determined by traditional infrastructure giants.

On January 19, 2026, the New York Stock Exchange (New York Stock Exchange) officially announced that it is developing a platform for tokenized securities trading and on-chain settlement and will apply to regulators for the necessary approvals for the platform. This news sparked considerable discussion in both traditional financial circles and the crypto industry, but most people simplified it into one sentence: “The NYSE is going to tokenize U.S. stocks.”

This statement is certainly correct, but far from enough. If you simply understand this as “stocks on the chain” or “traditional finance moving closer to Web3,” you have not yet seen the essence. The NYSE’s move is actually a well-considered institutional revolution. Crypto Salads hopes to start with this news itself and systematically sort out the current development process of the entire U.S. stock tokenization. As the opening of the series, this article will specifically discuss what this major news itself said and what impact it will have on the entire U.S. stock traditional industry.

1. What exactly did the NYSE news say? From the information officially announced by the NYSE, the NYSE is not just labeling stocks with “tokens.” Its core is not in a specific product but in the re-disassembly and reconstruction of the entire chain in the securities trading system. Among them, we noticed four core changes, which are summarized as follows:

(1) 7×24-hour trading

7×24-hour trading is a common core difference between the crypto financial market and the traditional financial market. However, the 7×24-hour trading mentioned by the NYSE this time is not simply extending the trading time but clearly focusing on “post-trade” infrastructure.

It wants to create a new digital platform that combines the existing matching engine (Pillar) with a blockchain-based post-trade system, so that the “trading, settlement, and custody” link can continue to operate. In short, the NYSE wants to create new technologies and institutional arrangements so that the settlement system itself can adapt to continuous operation.

The core reason why the traditional securities market has long adhered to fixed trading hours is that various procedures in the process, such as settlement and fund allocation, are highly dependent on the bank’s business hours and clearing windows. The NYSE proposed using on-chain or tokenized funding tools to cover the “funding breakpoints during non-business hours,” thereby activating the closing time of “night/weekend.”

Whether 24/7 trading is good or bad for the financial market and retail investors should be carefully considered by Crypto Salads. But it must be more beneficial than harmful to U.S. stocks themselves. After all, as the world’s most core asset pool, if the trading time of U.S. stocks is always fixed in the local area, it will not be able to go further and become a more global asset liquidity base.

(2) Stablecoin instant settlement

As mentioned earlier, the NYSE hopes to extend trading hours with the help of new “on-chain or tokenized funding tools.” One of the most core tools is the settlement tool.

The wording in the NYSE’s official press release is “instant settlement” and “stablecoin-based funding,” and it clearly states that the platform will use a “blockchain post-trade system” to achieve on-chain settlement.

Here we need to grasp two key points: First, the NYSE is not proposing such a basic vision as “buying stocks with stablecoins,” but hopes that stablecoins can become a tool for settlement and margin management. Second, the meaning of “instant settlement” is to develop delivery from the traditional T+1 to near real-time trading.

The most direct effect of this is to avoid various risks caused by the time difference between trading and settlement. The NYSE specifically mentioned that it is working with BNY and Citi to promote “tokenized deposits,” the purpose of which is to allow clearing members to transfer and manage funds, meet margin requirements, and cover funding needs across time zones and jurisdictions during non-business hours of banks.

(3) Fractional share trading

Now that we have talked about the innovation of trading infrastructure, let’s talk about the biggest benefit that innovation can bring (for non-U.S. investors). The narrative of U.S. stock tokenization has developed to this day, and we have analyzed the benefits and risks of fractional shares many times in our memory.

However, the NYSE’s news this time should be regarded as the first official proposal of the concept of “fractional share trading.” The news mentioned that the platform hopes to change the trading unit from the traditional 1 “share” to a unit that is closer to “asset allocation by amount.” One share of Tesla is now worth $400. Small retail investors cannot afford to buy it and cannot afford to fall, but if they can buy 0.025 shares of Tesla for $10 on the new platform in the future, is it very attractive?

Of course, making retail investors with average investment strength happy is definitely not the NYSE’s biggest goal. The NYSE matter redefines the minimum tradable unit of securities, making it suitable for the granularity of tokenization and on-chain settlement. This move has many implications.

First, the way market making and liquidity are supplied will undergo tremendous changes, because liquidity is no longer only around the depth of whole shares, but will be rebuilt around other standards (such as the amount). Second, when the platform allows “tokenized stocks and traditional issued securities to be mutually replaceable,” fractional shares make it easier for the same assets in different forms to be cleared, exchanged, and connected between different systems.

This is a bit abstract, but it can be simply compared to breaking whole banknotes into change and unifying the currency, which can be consumed and exchanged in different stores. In this structural adjustment, the significance of fractional share trading is also redefined. For a long time, fractional shares have been regarded as a “convenience function” for retail investors, but in this context, it is more like a prerequisite at the financial engineering level.

Only when assets can be standardized and split can they have further composability, routability, and programmability, and can they be included in the system of automated clearing and on-chain settlement. In other words, fractional shares are not for “making more people able to afford them,” but for making the assets themselves have the technical basis for digital circulation.

(4) Native Digital Securities (Natice Issuance)

On the concept of “native digital securities,” the NYSE also gave a very clear boundary. Its goal is not to simply map existing stocks to on-chain credentials like Nasdaq, but to explore the form of securities that run natively on the chain from the beginning of confirmation.

This means that dividends, voting rights, and corporate governance mechanisms are not patched through off-chain rules but are directly embedded in the life cycle of digital securities. This is not a technical packaging upgrade but a redefinition of the way securities exist.

Once native issuance is allowed, the confirmation of securities, the logic of the register of holders, company dividends, voting, governance, and custody and transfer restrictions must be redesigned. At the same time, the more attractive point is that the NYSE limits the distribution channel to qualified broker-dealers, which is also answering the core question that regulators will ask in advance: This is not a “wild token market” for retail investors to freely mint and freely circulate, but still retains order, thresholds, and management.

1. Why now?

Why now? Why would the NYSE propose such a “radical” reform at this moment? Any innovative form of financial product that truly enters the mainstream market is ultimately tested not by whether the narrative is pleasant but by whether the underlying system is robust enough to withstand the entry of large-scale, low-error-tolerance funds.

In the past few years, the market has not lacked discussions about “on-chain,” “decentralization,” and “efficiency revolution,” but the reason why these discussions have not been applied in reality is that they are often based on immature funding, clearing, and risk control foundations. The NYSE is also very smart. It does not try to run a blockchain system centered on itself but embeds tokenization into the existing market infrastructure.

Its parent company, ICE, is working with traditional core banks such as BNY Mellon and Citibank to support tokenized deposits and related funding tools within its clearinghouse system. This arrangement allows clearing members to still be able to allocate funds, fulfill margin obligations, and manage risk exposures during non-business hours of banks, thereby providing realistic and feasible funding and liquidity support for 7×24-hour trading.

What Crypto Salads wants to emphasize here is that when the funds themselves begin to be tokenized, we are no longer talking about “concept assets” but “money” itself, then regulation, risk control, and access standards must be raised to extremely high levels, otherwise the system will not be able to bear the trust of mainstream society at all.

It is also because of this that the NYSE did not try to “start a new stove” in the market structure design. The platform emphasizes “non-discriminatory access” under the compliance framework, but this non-discrimination always has boundaries – it is only open to qualified broker-dealers, and all trading behaviors are still embedded in the existing market structure and regulatory logic, rather than being outside the regulatory system.

Therefore, what can stand firm in the future is not a new “counterparty” but the infrastructure layer that can bear user understanding, asset allocation, and trading entry on top of the compliant trading system.

Under the influence of the general trend, seizing the ecological position and occupying the on-chain liquidity entry has become a must-win battle for various platform players such as Ondo, Kraken, and MSX. This race not only has the participation of Ondo crypto-native giants, but also platforms such as MSX that are deeply involved in the U.S. stock tokenization vertical track are also building their own defensive moats by frequently screening and launching new derivative products. For these small and medium-sized players with faster response speed and more accurate entry points, as long as they can gain a firm foothold in this wave, the future imagination space is huge.

At the same time, tokenization does not change the legal attributes of securities, and tokenized shareholders still fully enjoy the dividend rights and governance rights corresponding to traditional securities in law. This point was considered crucial in the meeting discussion: When a product tries to enter the mainstream capital market, whether the rights and interests are clear and whether the confirmation of rights is stable is far more important than the technical path itself.

From a more macro perspective, what the NYSE is trying to solve is not only the problem of trading efficiency but also the problem of liquidity fragmentation that has long plagued the traditional market. By combining “high-trust institutional arrangements” with “more efficient technical means,” it hopes to bring those trading demands that originally flowed to dark pools, over-the-counter structures, or non-regulatory platforms back into a transparent, auditable, and accountable system.

There was a recurring consensus in the meeting: The innovations that can truly survive the cycle are often not the most radical ones but those that can withstand the most stringent tests at the compliance and infrastructure level. Once such a structure is verified to be feasible, the entry of traditional funds is not a resistance but an accelerator.

From a lawyer’s perspective, the deep meaning of this process is not only a technical upgrade but also closer to a staged evolution of the way capital is formed. Through on-chain clearing and custody, traditional financial institutions can make asset allocation more global and time-continuous without overturning the existing securities law and regulatory framework. This is not “the old system being replaced by new technology” but new technology being incorporated into the most core and rigorous operating logic of the old system – and this is precisely the premise for mainstream finance to truly accept a new form.

[Crypto Salads]