Farewell to the Bundling Era: The Breakup Revolution in Global Financial Markets

Byline: Prathik Desai

Compiled by: Block unicorn

A clock is not a cure for latency. For decades, financial markets have been built around the speed at which existing information can be transmitted. They introduced closing bells, batch settlement, and regional exchanges—reasonable in an era when information traveled slowly. But all of that has changed. Capital won’t wait. Just as water always finds a way through cracks, capital does too. Financial gravity pulls it toward the path that gets price information fastest. That is the law of the market. Market participants won’t tolerate inefficiency forever.

That’s what I’ve been seeing over the past few weeks while observing the development of financial markets from a macro perspective.

In today’s article, I’ll help you understand what is breaking the old, bundled structure of financial markets—turning it into a more efficient, unbundled structure that can span different venues, packaging, and time.

Job switch

I’ve been learning finance for more than ten years. In the early stages of my study, I treated traditional securities exchanges as synonymous with “the market.” For much of the time as they evolved, exchanges were where everything—and everyone—converged: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technology that drives markets. They had indices that track constituent stocks, and clocks that signal trading time, telling everyone when they can trade and when they can’t.

But that has changed in the past few years. In fact, just over the past few weeks, we’ve already seen multiple developments that confirm this shift.

On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices authorized the S&P 500 index to Trade[XYZ], allowing HIP-3 market deployers to launch the first and only S&P 500 perpetual derivatives contract on the Hyperliquid exchange. The S&P 500 index is the most widely followed U.S. large-cap stock index globally, tracking 500 of America’s leading companies, covering roughly 80% of the total U.S. market cap, with a market cap of more than $61 trillion. The index covers at least half of the market value of the global equities market.

It’s an index that has existed for nearly 70 years, yet it’s been listed in a market that has been around for only 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; its notional trading volume is typically higher than that of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which is the exchange with the largest global market cap.

On March 16, Cboe Global Markets (the Chicago Options Exchange Global Markets) submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch “near-24/5 (24x5) U.S. stock trading.” The largest operator behind this U.S. financial exchange said it is ready to provide around-the-clock stock trading services as early as December 2026.

But why is that?

More and more people are demanding extended trading hours for U.S. stocks.

Together, these three initiatives target an outdated, bundled trading structure. The S&P 500 index futures trading market launched by Hyperliquid challenges the decades-long convention that investors can trade traditional indexes only through traditional markets. It also makes it possible to trade one of the most-followed large-cap benchmarks 24/7 across the globe.

Nasdaq’s tokenized stock trading initiative is aimed at infrastructure. It introduces a new packaging format that allows the same stock to be traded in different ways. Earlier attempts at tokenized stocks had faced criticism from the industry.

Investors question whether these tokens confer the same rights as the underlying shares.

But if I can provide the same equity exposure through tokens on a blockchain—while not losing the voting rights and legal protections that come with the underlying dematerialized stock—wouldn’t you accept that?

Why would you do something like that? What’s in it for you?

So, what if you’re an investor outside the U.S. who wants easier access to stocks in the world’s largest economy? And what if tokenized stocks make it easier to integrate with collateral and lending systems?

When you factor in around-the-clock trading, these advantages multiply.

That’s what the Chicago Options Exchange (Cboe) is attacking. Its near-24/5 plan—5 days a week, 24 hours a day—aims to acknowledge that capital won’t wait for office hours. Traders always want to express their views immediately after they get the information. If Cboe doesn’t provide them a market to do that, traders will flock to other platforms that do.

Everything I’ve said isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t “something that might happen sometime soon.” It’s happening—right now, as we speak.

A split future

In Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market, the adoption of financial product splitting is most clearly on display; that market only launched officially in late October 2025.

In just the past month, HIP-3 market cumulative trading volume increased by $72 billion. Previously, for the prior four months, cumulative trading volume was $78 billion.

In March, Trade[XYZ]’s perpetual markets for traditional financial instruments and stocks accounted for 90% of HIP-3 daily trading volume. But that’s not the most interesting part.

More than half of Trade[XYZ]’s trading volume comes from perpetual contract markets for silver, crude oil, Brent crude, and gold.

Hyperliquid offers a unified trading venue for spot crypto trading as well as perpetual contracts for crypto and traditional assets. This not only simplifies the trading flow on a unified platform, but also brings higher liquidity, a unified user interface, and tighter bid-ask spreads.

Traders still want to trade some of the largest and hottest assets, spanning commodities, listed companies, large private companies, and indices. You might want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, indices that track the top 100 U.S. non-financial companies, and the S&P 500 index—all of which can be done on the Hyperliquid platform.

HIP-3 separates the ability to invest in these assets from the existing exchange infrastructure, while still tracking the underlying benchmark assets. So when you go long silver futures on HIP-3, the tracked underlying asset is still pegged to the value of one troy ounce of silver from the Pyth data source.

Traders choose to move from the prior platform to trade silver on HIP-3 because HIP-3 doesn’t distinguish between U.S. and non-U.S. traders and doesn’t follow any particular schedule. Whenever events occur that lead traders to express views through asset pricing, HIP-3 provides a market for them—unconstrained by the trader’s geography or time zone.

Over the past few weeks, open interest (OI) on the Hyperliquid platform has grown significantly, clearly reflecting the results above. OI measures the total value of open derivative positions. Unlike trading volume, which reflects how active trading is, OI reflects trading commitment.

On March 1, open interest was $1.13 billion. On April 1, it doubled to $2.2 billion. That indicates traders are confident in Hyperliquid’s perpetual contracts and are locking in capital.

These metrics show that when market access becomes easier and friction is reduced, traders won’t remain loyal to a platform or any single asset class. They will choose any platform that offers volatility, convenience, and liquidity.

That’s why traditional institutions such as S&P, Nasdaq, and the Chicago Options Exchange are moving to recognize this behavior.

At least two recent events have demonstrated the importance of around-the-clock trading and market volatility to traders.

In a tweet on Decentralised.Co, Saurabh wrote: “On February 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran while traditional markets were closed. Within hours, the prices of oil-linked perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform jumped 5%, because traders processed the shock in real time.”

Just two weeks after the outbreak of war, trading volume for oil-linked perpetual contracts surged from $200 million to a cumulative $6 billion.

A major hidden risk for emerging platforms is liquidity. If liquidity is insufficient, bid-ask spreads can widen, putting traders at a pricing disadvantage more severe than on other platforms.

Last week before last, as U.S. President Trump was consulting with Iranian officials to hold “productive talks,” the Hyperliquid platform demonstrated its strong liquidity. Newly launched S&P 500 index futures based on the HIP-3 platform can track the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) E-mini S&P 500 index futures price action with precision down to the minute.

Even though on-chain perpetual contracts trade roughly 50–70 points lower than ES, the magnitude of price movements is very similar.

What does this mean?

For decades, traditional markets have been bundled together and controlled in terms of venue (exchanges), time (trading sessions), and products (indices / contracts).

They chose to maintain the status quo because they failed to build corresponding mechanisms to address inefficiencies such as time delays, restrictions on trading hours, and regulatory limits on non-U.S. investors. Instead, they covered up these inefficiencies and packaged them into procedural governance systems that were presented as designed to build trustworthy institutions—in an effort to attract investors.

People still trade and invest. It’s not because they’re foolish, or because they were misled by the various narratives traditional financial markets sell. They do it because they have no choice. That began to change after blockchains emerged—blockchains provide the world with on-chain markets, making trading and investing more convenient than ever.

People saw this choice—and they took it.

They didn’t care before, and they won’t care later about changes to market structure. Whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled doesn’t matter to them. Whether current institutions are willing or not doesn’t matter either—so long as traders and investors can express their views more conveniently through financial instruments, they will accept the new market structure. As for whether this structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, the Chicago Options Exchange, or S&P 500, or from permissionless platforms running on blockchains, it doesn’t matter.

The financial industry keeps evolving, as always, and will adopt whatever structure can narrow the gap between events happening and price expressing those views.

Important events happen everywhere, every moment. So why should prices wait until a clock in a glass-walled office building in New York starts ticking on Monday morning to decide?