Stock Market Split
Author: Prathik Desai
Compiled by: Block unicorn
Introduction
The clock is not a good remedy for covering delays. For decades, financial markets have been built around the speed of information transmission. They introduced closing bells, batch settlements, and regional exchanges, which made sense in an era of slow information flow. But all of that has changed. Capital will not wait. Just as water will always find a crack, so will capital. Financial gravity will pull it toward the fastest path to price information. This is the law of the market. Market participants will not tolerate inefficiency forever.
This is what I have observed from a macro perspective regarding the development of financial markets over the past few weeks.
In today’s article, I will help you understand what has broken the old bundled structure of financial markets, transforming it into a more efficient, unbundled structure that spans different venues, packaging, and time.
Job Change
I have been studying finance for over a decade. In the early stages of my learning, I regarded traditional stock exchanges as synonymous with the market. For most of their development, stock exchanges have been the gathering place for everyone and everything: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technology that drives the market. They have indices that track component stocks and clocks that indicate trading times, telling everyone when they can trade and when they cannot.
But this has changed over the past few years. In fact, just in the past few weeks, we have seen several developments confirming this shift.
On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 Index to Trade[XYZ], allowing HIP-3 market deployers to launch the first and only perpetual derivatives contract based on the S&P 500 Index on the Hyperliquid exchange. The S&P 500 Index is the most closely watched large-cap index in the U.S., tracking 500 leading companies and covering about 80% of the total U.S. market capitalization, which exceeds $61 trillion. This index covers at least half of the global stock market capitalization.
This is an index that has been around for nearly 70 years, yet it is listed on a market that has only been established for 6 months.
The day after S&P announced this news, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq's application to trade and settle certain stocks in token form. Nasdaq is one of the most active trading venues globally, with nominal trading volumes often exceeding those of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which is the largest exchange by market capitalization.
On March 16, Cboe Global Markets submitted a proposal to the SEC to launch "near 24x5 U.S. stock trading." The largest operating entity behind this U.S. financial exchange stated that it is prepared to offer around-the-clock stock trading services as early as December 2026.
But why is this happening? There is an increasing demand for extended trading hours for U.S. stocks.
These three initiatives collectively target the outdated bundled trading structure. The S&P 500 futures trading market launched by Hyperliquid challenges the convention that investors could only trade traditional indices through traditional markets for decades. It also makes it possible to trade one of the most tracked large-cap indices globally 24/7.
Nasdaq's tokenized stock trading initiative addresses infrastructure. It introduces a new form of packaging that allows the same stock to be traded in different ways. Previous attempts at tokenized stocks had faced criticism from the industry.
Investors questioned whether these tokens enjoyed the same rights as the original shares.
However, if I provide the same equity exposure through a token on the blockchain while retaining the voting rights and legal protections associated with the original dematerialized shares, wouldn’t you accept that?
Why would you do this? What’s in it for you?
So, what if you are an investor outside the U.S. looking for easier access to the stock market of the world’s largest economy? What if this tokenized stock made it easier for you to integrate it with collateral and lending systems?
When you consider around-the-clock trading, these advantages multiply.
This is what Cboe is criticizing. Its near around-the-clock (5 days a week, 24 hours a day) trading proposal aims to acknowledge that capital will not wait for office hours. Traders always want to express their views immediately after receiving information. If Cboe does not provide them with a market to express their views, traders will turn to other platforms that offer such markets.
What I am saying is not hypothetical or something that "might happen in the near future." It is happening right now as we speak.
A Split Future
In the HIP-3 market of Hyperliquid, the adoption of financial product splitting is most evident, with the market officially launching in late October 2025.
In just the past month, the cumulative trading volume of the HIP-3 market has increased by $72 billion. The cumulative trading volume for the previous four months was $78 billion.
In March, Trade[XYZ]’s perpetual market on traditional financial products and stocks accounted for 90% of HIP-3's daily trading volume. But that’s not the most interesting aspect.
More than half of Trade[XYZ]’s trading volume comes from the perpetual contract markets for silver, crude oil, Brent crude oil, and gold.
Hyperliquid provides a unified trading platform for trading spot cryptocurrencies as well as perpetual contracts for cryptocurrencies and traditional assets. This not only simplifies the trading process on a unified platform but also brings higher liquidity, a unified user interface, and smaller bid-ask spreads.
Traders still want to trade some of the largest and hottest assets, covering commodities, publicly listed companies, large private companies, and indices. You might want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, indices tracking the top 100 non-financial companies in the U.S., and the S&P 500 Index—all of which can be done on the Hyperliquid platform.
HIP-3 separates the functionality of investing in these assets from the existing exchange infrastructure while still tracking the underlying assets of its original benchmarks. Therefore, when you go long on silver futures contracts on HIP-3, the underlying asset it tracks is still linked to the value of one ounce of silver in the Pyth data source.
The reason traders are choosing to trade silver on HIP-3 instead of previous platforms is that HIP-3 does not differentiate between U.S. and non-U.S. traders and does not follow any specific time. Whenever an event occurs where traders want to express their views through asset pricing, HIP-3 provides them with a market, unrestricted by the traders' geographical location or time zone.
In the past few weeks, the open interest (OI) on the Hyperliquid platform has grown significantly, reflecting the results mentioned above. OI measures the total value of open derivative positions. Unlike trading volume, which reflects trading activity, OI reflects trading commitments.
On March 1, the open interest was $1.13 billion, which doubled to $2.2 billion by April 1. This indicates that traders are confident in Hyperliquid's perpetual contracts and are locking in their funds.
These indicators suggest that when market access is more convenient and friction is reduced, traders will not be loyal to any particular platform or asset class. They will choose any platform that can provide volatility, convenience, and liquidity.
This is why traditional institutions like S&P, Nasdaq, and Cboe are taking steps to acknowledge this behavior.
At least two recent events have demonstrated the importance of around-the-clock trading and market volatility to traders.
Saurabh wrote in a tweet from Decentralised.Co: "On February 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran during traditional market hours. Within hours, the price of oil-linked perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform surged by 5% as traders digested the shock in real-time."
Just two weeks after the outbreak of war, the trading volume of oil-linked perpetual contracts surged from $200 million to a cumulative $6 billion.
One major risk for emerging platforms is liquidity. If liquidity is insufficient, bid-ask spreads may widen, leading to a pricing disadvantage for traders compared to other platforms.
The week before last, as U.S. President Trump was negotiating for "productive talks" with Iranian officials, the Hyperliquid platform demonstrated its strong liquidity. The newly launched S&P 500 futures based on the HIP-3 platform was able to accurately track the movements of the CME E-mini S&P 500 futures, down to the minute.
Although the on-chain perpetual contracts were about 50-70 points lower than ES, the price movements were quite similar.
What This Means
For decades, traditional markets have been bundled together, controlling venues (exchanges), time (trading hours), and products (indices/contracts).
They have chosen to maintain the status quo because they have failed to establish mechanisms to address inefficiencies such as time delays, trading hour restrictions, and regulatory limitations for non-U.S. investors. Instead, they have covered up these inefficiencies and packaged them into procedural systems designed to create a trustworthy institution to attract investors.
People will still trade and invest. This is not because they are foolish or gullible to the various claims made by traditional financial markets. They do so because they have no other choice. This situation began to change with the advent of blockchain, which provided the world with on-chain markets, making trading and investing unprecedentedly convenient.
People see this choice and seize it.
They did not care in the past and will not care in the future about changes in market structure. Whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled does not concern them. As long as traders and investors can express their opinions more conveniently through financial instruments, they will accept the new market structure. Whether this structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, Cboe, or the S&P 500, or from permissionless platforms running on blockchain, is irrelevant.
The financial industry continues to evolve and will adopt any structure that can narrow the gap between the occurrence of events and the expression of price opinions.
Important events are happening all over the world every moment. So why should prices wait until the clock in a glass curtain building in New York starts ticking on Monday morning to be determined?
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Mixin has launched USTD-margined perpetual contracts, bringing derivative trading into the chat scene.
The privacy-focused crypto wallet Mixin announced today the launch of its U-based perpetual contract (a derivative priced in USDT). Unlike traditional exchanges, Mixin has taken a new approach by "liberating" derivative trading from isolated matching engines and embedding it into the instant messaging environment.
Users can directly open positions within the app with leverage of up to 200x, while sharing positions, discussing strategies, and copy trading within private communities. Trading, social interaction, and asset management are integrated into the same interface.
Based on its non-custodial architecture, Mixin has eliminated friction from the traditional onboarding process, allowing users to participate in perpetual contract trading without identity verification.
The trading process has been streamlined into five steps:
· Choose the trading asset
· Select long or short
· Input position size and leverage
· Confirm order details
· Confirm and open the position
The interface provides real-time visualization of price, position, and profit and loss (PnL), allowing users to complete trades without switching between multiple modules.
Mixin has directly integrated social features into the derivative trading environment. Users can create private trading communities and interact around real-time positions:
· End-to-end encrypted private groups supporting up to 1024 members
· End-to-end encrypted voice communication
· One-click position sharing
· One-click trade copying
On the execution side, Mixin aggregates liquidity from multiple sources and accesses decentralized protocol and external market liquidity through a unified trading interface.
By combining social interaction with trade execution, Mixin enables users to collaborate, share, and execute trading strategies instantly within the same environment.
Mixin has also introduced a referral incentive system based on trading behavior:
· Users can join with an invite code
· Up to 60% of trading fees as referral rewards
· Incentive mechanism designed for long-term, sustainable earnings
This model aims to drive user-driven network expansion and organic growth.
Mixin's derivative transactions are built on top of its existing self-custody wallet infrastructure, with core features including:
· Separation of transaction account and asset storage
· User full control over assets
· Platform does not custody user funds
· Built-in privacy mechanisms to reduce data exposure
The system aims to strike a balance between transaction efficiency, asset security, and privacy protection.
Against the background of perpetual contracts becoming a mainstream trading tool, Mixin is exploring a different development direction by lowering barriers, enhancing social and privacy attributes.
The platform does not only view transactions as execution actions but positions them as a networked activity: transactions have social attributes, strategies can be shared, and relationships between individuals also become part of the financial system.
Mixin's design is based on a user-initiated, user-controlled model. The platform neither custodies assets nor executes transactions on behalf of users.
This model aligns with a statement issued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 13, 2026, titled "Staff Statement on Whether Partial User Interface Used in Preparing Cryptocurrency Securities Transactions May Require Broker-Dealer Registration."
The statement indicates that, under the premise where transactions are entirely initiated and controlled by users, non-custodial service providers that offer neutral interfaces may not need to register as broker-dealers or exchanges.
Mixin is a decentralized, self-custodial privacy wallet designed to provide secure and efficient digital asset management services.
Its core capabilities include:
· Aggregation: integrating multi-chain assets and routing between different transaction paths to simplify user operations
· High liquidity access: connecting to various liquidity sources, including decentralized protocols and external markets
· Decentralization: achieving full user control over assets without relying on custodial intermediaries
· Privacy protection: safeguarding assets and data through MPC, CryptoNote, and end-to-end encrypted communication
Mixin has been in operation for over 8 years, supporting over 40 blockchains and more than 10,000 assets, with a global user base exceeding 10 million and an on-chain self-custodied asset scale of over $1 billion.

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