LSEG has outlined plans for 24/5 trading, a digital securities depository, tokenized equities, and new infrastructure involving Kraken and HSBC.

LSEG plans to connect trading and tokenized settlement

The European Blockchain Convention’s Day 2 media briefing attributed the plans to Darko Hajdukovic of London Stock Exchange Group, who discussed the projects during a panel on institutional digital-market infrastructure.

“In the first half of next year we move to a 24/5 trading cycle, LSEG24. We’re building a digital securities depository, partnering with Kraken to list on it, and building tokenised equity tokens. We’ve also signed an MOU with HSBC on an interoperable link,” Hajdukovic said.

The comments indicate that LSEG is working across several parts of the trading process rather than developing a single tokenization product. Trading, depository services, listings and connections with other financial institutions each address a separate part of the market.

Hajdukovic referred to the first half of next year while speaking at the 2026 conference, placing the planned LSEG24 move in the first half of 2027. The media copy did not provide a specific launch date or identify which securities would initially trade through the system.

LSEG’s digital securities depository would support the recording and settlement of eligible assets, while its work with Kraken could bring a crypto-native platform into the listing process. The agreement with HSBC concerns an interoperable link, according to the supplied remarks.

Tokenized equities are moving into regulated markets

LSEG’s plans arrive as exchanges and brokers test different ways to connect conventional shares with blockchain networks. Some products represent beneficial interests in securities held by a custodian, while others provide only contractual exposure to the price of an underlying stock.

As crypto.news previously reported, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said tokenized stocks should hold real securities rather than operate as synthetic price-tracking instruments. Coinbase introduced Base-native tokens linked to Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet for eligible non-U.S. customers in August.

Ownership structure remains important because a blockchain token does not automatically provide voting rights, dividends or a direct legal claim against the issuing company. Product terms, custody arrangements and the official shareholder register determine what an investor owns.

Kraken has already moved beyond simple stock-token trading. In September, the exchange introduced xStocks yield vaults for products linked to the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, Invesco QQQ Trust and Nvidia.

The vaults allow customers to deposit selected xStocks and earn returns generated through automated strategies. Kraken charges a 25% performance fee, which it deducts before displaying the estimated annual percentage yield, according to the exchange’s documentation.

LSEG did not say whether its planned tokenized equities would use the same legal model as xStocks or Coinbase’s products. Hajdukovic also did not identify which blockchain would support the tokens during the quoted portion of the panel.

Always-on markets create a settlement challenge

Nadine Teychenne of Citi told the same conference panel that blockchain infrastructure can give institutions a real-time record of transactions and programmable assets.

“What’s most interesting is the real-time, always-on nature of the blockchain single source of truth, but also the programmability of assets, which we’re starting to see with tokenised money market funds,” Teychenne said.

Citi has worked on blockchain systems since 2015, she added, including wallet infrastructure and internal tokenized deposits that can move client funds globally at any time.

Extended trading does not by itself provide round-the-clock access to bank money. Securities may trade during the night or on weekends while the banking rails used to fund and settle transactions remain closed or operate under limited hours.

A September analysis of weekend dollar funding gaps found that always-open tokenized markets can face liquidity pressure when traditional dollar settlement systems are unavailable. The problem becomes more relevant when a platform promises continuous trading but relies on banking partners to process cash movements.

LSEG launched its Digital Settlement House earlier in 2026 to support transactions involving commercial bank money, securities, and digital assets. According to LSEG, the service permits 24/7 transfers and uses synchronized settlement to reduce the period during which either party faces completion risk.

U.S. markets are considering similar changes

For American investors, LSEG’s roadmap sits alongside efforts in the United States to extend equity-trading hours and establish rules for tokenized securities.

U.S. platforms have traditionally relied on overnight trading venues outside standard exchange hours, but exchange operators have pursued longer sessions in response to international demand. Any extended schedule still requires market surveillance, resilient clearing systems, and adequate liquidity during hours when participation may be lower.

Tokenized shares raise a separate regulatory question in the United States. A product backed by a security can remain subject to federal securities law even when its ownership record or transfer process uses a blockchain.

SEC treatment can depend on whether a token represents the actual security, a beneficial interest held through an intermediary, or a derivative that tracks its price. Transfer-agent records, custody terms and shareholder rights therefore matter alongside the technology used to move the token.

At the Barcelona panel, Coco Chen of the Association for Financial Markets in Europe asked participants how institutional market infrastructure had developed in recent years. Teychenne said Citi was already moving client money through live internal tokenized deposits, while Hajdukovic listed LSEG24, the depository project, tokenized equity products and the HSBC connection as LSEG’s next projects.

A BaFin official has warned that centralized EU crypto supervision could place extra burdens on firms while reducing flexibility in applying MiCA rules.

Centralized MiCA supervision could reduce flexibility

The European Blockchain Convention’s Day 2 briefing attributed the warning to Stephan Mögelin of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, or BaFin, during a panel on proposed changes to the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework.

Mögelin said centralized supervisors could still depend on knowledge held by national authorities, particularly when dealing with the characteristics of individual markets.

“What we’ve seen, for example, in the application of EMIR, is that with a centralised supervisor, one might assume the application and understanding of specific provisions also becomes somewhat centralised,” he said.

According to Mögelin, centralization could leave crypto-asset service providers with less flexibility when regulators apply individual provisions. Moving responsibility after companies have already completed national authorization procedures could also create additional work.

“Market participants and clients should decide what they consider beneficial, because these firms currently go through an authorisation process, and shifting responsibility to a centralised entity might add burdens regardless of the outcome.”

Under MiCA, a crypto-asset service provider can obtain authorization from a national regulator and use the resulting passport to operate across the European Economic Area. A centralized model would transfer some supervisory responsibility from national authorities to an EU-level body.

MiCA licensing has divided access to the EU market

MiCA has created a common licensing structure for exchanges, custodians and other crypto service providers, although national regulators continue to process applications and supervise licensed firms.

In July, Ripple secured its MiCA authorization from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier. The approval permits the company to offer regulated crypto payment services across 30 European Economic Area countries.

As crypto.news previously reported, Ripple paired the crypto-asset service provider license with an electronic money institution license. The combination supports payment services involving crypto assets and stablecoins under the company’s European structure.

MiCA’s passport system can reduce the need for separate approvals in every participating country, but Mögelin’s remarks point to the trade-off between consistent supervision and national discretion. Firms may receive access across the region through one authorization while remaining dependent on how the regulator in their home jurisdiction applies the rules.

The EBC media briefing said the MiCA consultation had been extended to Sep. 30. During the panel, moderator Tommaso Astazi of Blockchain for Europe asked which areas of the framework required changes and whether supervision should move toward a centralized structure.

Private law remains incomplete for crypto assets

Mögelin identified the legal treatment of crypto assets outside financial-services regulation as another unresolved issue.

“From a supervisory and risk-management perspective, what we’ve seen so far is that MiCA and other European frameworks provide only a regulatory framework for financial services.”

“What’s still missing in most member states is a private law framework for specific crypto assets.”

Private law governs questions such as ownership, transfers, contractual claims and the treatment of assets when an intermediary fails. A financial-services license can regulate the conduct of an exchange or custodian without resolving every question about who legally owns a token or how creditors should treat it during insolvency.

Mögelin said the consultation was considering whether a European-level private-law framework could prevent another layer of fragmentation. Without common treatment, the same token could fall under different ownership or insolvency rules depending on the member state handling the dispute.

Similar ownership questions have emerged around tokenized securities. A token can record a transaction on a blockchain, but the legal register, custody agreement and applicable securities law determine whether the holder owns a share, a beneficial interest or only a contractual claim.

The United Kingdom is addressing related questions outside MiCA. In September, the House of Lords backed a digital asset strategy amendment by 194 votes to 138.

The proposed strategy would cover crypto assets, stablecoins, tokenized securities and digital settlement systems. The Treasury would have 12 months after Royal Assent to publish the strategy, although the bill must still pass through the House of Commons before the requirement becomes law.

E-money tokens could support tokenized settlement

During the BaFin panel, Mögelin also discussed the role of e-money tokens, a MiCA category covering crypto assets designed to maintain their value by referencing one official currency.

He said the convergence of crypto service providers and conventional financial institutions had increased interest in using e-money tokens inside traditional market infrastructure. One possible use involves supplying the cash side of transactions in tokenized securities.

Tokenized trades require both the asset and payment legs to settle. If one side moves through blockchain infrastructure while the other remains dependent on conventional bank transfers, the parties can face delays or completion risk.

Mögelin said regulators were discussing whether services involving e-money tokens could extend to credit or lending. In his account, such services could increase efficiency for companies operating across both crypto assets and tokenized financial instruments.

U.S. regulators face a related division between securities oversight and payment regulation. A tokenized stock generally falls within securities rules, while the stablecoin used to settle the trade can raise separate questions involving reserves, redemption rights, banking relationships and federal or state supervision.

Mögelin’s comments did not call for removing national authorities from the MiCA system. He said even a centralized supervisor could benefit from member-state expertise, while firms and their clients should assess whether transferring authorization responsibilities would provide enough value to offset the operational burden.

Democratic leaders sound the alarm on “terribly flawed” bill

If you know anything about filmmaker John Wilson, you’ll intuit that his new documentary The History of Concrete is barely about concrete at all. Earlier this decade, Wilson’s HBO show, How To With John Wilson, provided a sometimes compelling, sometimes aggravating glimpse into the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, as well as into Wilson’s own woolly, discursive mode of thinking. In one episode, Wilson walked around a New York neighborhood until he saw an Italian flag, figuring that the person who’d hung it would know enough about Italian food to help him learn to cook risotto, which he wanted to make as a treat for his elderly, babushka’ed landlady. In another installment, he sought ways to protect his furniture from his beloved yet destructive cat, and in so doing, stumbled upon an anti-circumcision activist, who in turn led him to a musician and inventor who’d developed a foreskin restoration device. (It was called the TLC Tugger.) In Wilson’s world, the phrase “One thing leads to another” takes on heightened meaning. He shifts gears according to who and what he encounters during the filmmaking process, which is how a simple quest to cover a chair can morph into an anxiety-riddled meditation on the possibility that maybe life is better uncut.

But theirs are old stories, already told and retold in every conceivable media, and often, effectively, by women. Wuornos was, of course, most famously portrayed by Charlize Theron, in writer-director Patty Jenkins’ career-making, Oscar-winning 2003 film also titled Monster. Isabelle Huppert stars as Báthory in The Blood Countess, a new feature by German experimental cinema legend Ulrike Ottinger, which is earning praise on the festival circuit for its strangeness and sense of humor. Meanwhile, on TV, creator Liz Meriwether just gave us Furious—another story of female rage, female repression, and yes, even a (fictional) female serial killer. While Krieps is mesmerizing in Monster and frequent Murphy production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson has outdone himself with lavishly suffocating Gilded Age interiors, Furious is the superior show because it takes “being a woman is hard” as the given it is rather than as the endpoint of many repetitive episodes. It has dark, lived-in comedy and real stakes, posing the question of what can realistically be done about systemic misogyny and the anger over it that stains women’s lives.

Restricting opposition

The SEC has opened permissioned onchain trading to fully backed U.S. stock tokens, but the 32.5-hour trading week on NYSE and Nasdaq leaves automated markets without a live reference price for most of each 168-hour week.

The SEC’s temporary exemption allows qualifying venues to bring buyers and sellers together through permissioned automated market maker pools for tokenized National Market System stocks.

Under the order, each token must provide the same rights and privileges as an equivalent class of conventional stock. The SEC also placed limits on the number of available symbols and trading volume, while requiring public, auditable smart contracts deployed on permissionless blockchains.

Trading venues must stop onchain activity whenever the primary exchange halts the underlying stock. Ordinary closures at night, on weekends or during holidays are treated differently, leaving tokenized venues able to operate when NYSE and Nasdaq are not producing live prices.

Tokenized stocks lose their main price reference after hours

Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder and chief operating officer of blockchain oracle provider RedStone, told crypto.news that the missing reference market presents a more serious problem than liquidity fragmentation or arbitrage alone.

An automated market maker sets prices from the assets held in its own pool. Arbitrage traders can correct a price difference by buying in the cheaper market and selling in the more expensive one, but Kaźmierczak said the process weakens when the main U.S. equity market is closed.

“An AMM only prices off its own pool, arbitrage keeps that honest but only while the reference market is open, and NYSE/Nasdaq trade about 32.5 hours a week out of 168.”

During regular U.S. trading hours, market makers can compare an onchain token with the underlying share and trade away gaps. Overnight or during a weekend, however, the stock’s deepest venue is not publishing a current executable price.

At such times, an AMM may react to orders placed inside a much smaller liquidity pool. Large trades can move its quoted price even when investors cannot immediately buy or sell the underlying share to complete the other side of an arbitrage transaction.

The challenge does not fade as activity rises, according to Kaźmierczak. Higher order sizes can increase the price impact of each AMM transaction, while the number of hours without a live primary-market reference stays unchanged.

“It gets harder, not easier. Price impact per AMM trade grows with size, and the hours without a live reference price don’t shrink just because volume goes up.”

SEC rules create separate classes of tokenized stocks

Alongside the timing gap, Kaźmierczak pointed to a split between qualifying ownership tokens and synthetic stock products already available through offshore services.

The SEC order covers tokenized NMS stocks that give holders rights and privileges matching the traditional shares. Kaźmierczak said products such as Robinhood’s Stock Tokens and Kraken’s xStocks use separate structures and are not governed by the new exemption.

As a result, investors could see a conventional U.S. share, a fully backed ownership token covered by the SEC framework, and a synthetic or wrapped product associated with the same company. Each instrument may trade under different rules and carry different rights.

“So you don’t just get tokenized versus traditional, you get two classes of tokenized product for the same underlying stock, priced differently, under different rules,” Kaźmierczak said.

A recent Coinbase stock-token report showed how such rights can vary even when tokens have share backing. Coinbase’s products represent beneficial interests in shares held through an offshore special-purpose company and a regulated U.S. broker, while qualified holders can request redemption under specified compliance rules.

Coinbase has offered Base-native tokens tied to Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet to eligible non-U.S. investors. Its prospectuses state that legal title generally remains with a trust, meaning wallet holders do not appear directly on the underlying company’s shareholder register.

Redemption also depends on identity, location, sanctions, and anti-money laundering checks. According to the product documents, an onchain buyer who has not completed the process can transfer a token but cannot exercise redemption or voting rights until approved.

Issuer objections address ownership, not synthetic products

For tokens created by an unaffiliated third party, the SEC requires a venue to give the underlying company written notice and an opportunity to object before trading begins. The process addresses a governance dispute already visible between public companies and token issuers.

AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron recently objected after learning that Robinhood had created an AMC-linked token without the company’s approval. As previous coverage detailed, Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited issued synthetic exposure to more than 190 companies without giving holders ownership, voting power or standard shareholder protections.

Kaźmierczak cited the AMC dispute as an example of why the SEC included issuer notice and objection rights. Yet he said the rule’s effect remains limited because synthetic products outside the exemption do not have to follow the same process.

“The products causing that fight are synthetic and won’t even be governed by today’s framework,” he said.

Under the exemption, qualifying venues must also disclose information about their operations, trading and affiliated activity. The SEC granted separate conditional relief from dealer registration to certain liquidity providers using their own capital in the approved AMM pools.

The relief will expire five years after publication, while the agency has requested public comments on possible changes and subsequent regulatory action.

Around-the-clock markets depend on offchain infrastructure

Other tokenized markets have encountered a similar mismatch between continuous blockchain activity and financial systems that keep fixed operating hours.

In September, DBS and Citi completed a cross-border tokenized-deposit payment from Singapore to New York within minutes on a Saturday. A weekend funding analysis found that the transaction demonstrated continuous money movement but did not establish whether every underlying obligation reached final legal settlement at the same time.

Fedwire does not currently operate continuously through weekends, which can leave banks using tokenized payments dependent on prefunded balances or added liquidity buffers until central bank settlement systems reopen.

Stock tokens face a related data constraint rather than the same settlement issue. Kaźmierczak said keeping share-linked instruments aligned requires reliable price information when the underlying market is open and rules for periods when it is not.

“Price risk scales with data infrastructure. Consent risk scales with governance,” he said. “Neither is solved by this exemption alone, and both compound as volume grows.”

Product structures are also becoming more complex. Kraken recently introduced three xStocks vaults that accept SPYx, QQQx and NVDAx, offering estimated net annual yields of 2%, 2% and 1.8%, respectively, during the initial rollout.

The vaults use deposited tokens as collateral for stablecoin loans before routing funds through cross-chain decentralized finance strategies. Kraken’s disclosures identify liquidation, bad debt, smart-contract, cross-chain, and liquidity risks, while withdrawals generally carry a three-day waiting period and may take longer during market stress.