Tokenized Stocks Face 32.5-Hour Pricing Gap, RedStone COO Warns

Tokenized Stocks Face 32.5-Hour Pricing Gap, RedStone COO Warns

The Securities and Exchange Commission may have opened the door to fully backed onchain stock trading in the United States, but one of the industry’s key infrastructure providers says a much older problem now sits at the center of the experiment: the calendar.

Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder and chief operating officer of blockchain oracle provider RedStone, told crypto.news that the regulator’s temporary exemption for tokenized National Market System stocks leaves automated markets without a live reference price for most of each week. The NYSE and Nasdaq trade roughly 32.5 hours out of 168, and once the closing bell rings on Friday, tokenized venues are on their own until Monday.

His argument is deceptively simple. An automated market maker prices assets only from the tokens held in its own pool. During regular U.S. equity hours, arbitrage traders compare the onchain token with the underlying share and trade away any difference, keeping the pool honest. When the primary market is closed, that corrective mechanism weakens dramatically.

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

Overnight and on weekends, a large order routed into a comparatively shallow liquidity pool can move an AMM’s quoted price even when traders cannot buy or sell the underlying share to complete the other side of the arbitrage. And unlike liquidity fragmentation, which tends to shrink as volume grows, the timing problem does not self-correct.

“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,” he added.

Two classes of tokens for the same share

The pricing gap is not the only wrinkle. Kazmierczak pointed to a growing split between qualifying ownership tokens covered by the SEC framework and synthetic stock products already offered through offshore venues.

The SEC’s five-year relief, issued as an innovation exemption, covers tokenized NMS stocks that grant holders the same rights and privileges as conventional shares. Products such as Robinhood’s Stock Tokens and Kraken’s xStocks use separate structures and fall outside the exemption entirely.

The practical result is that a single company can have a traditional share, a fully backed ownership token regulated under the new framework, and a synthetic or wrapped product, all trading under different rules with different rights attached.

“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,” Kazmierczak said.

Even fully backed tokens vary in what holders actually receive. Coinbase’s Base-native stock tokens, offered to eligible non-U.S. investors for companies including Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet, represent beneficial interests in shares held through an offshore special-purpose company and a regulated U.S. broker. Legal title generally remains with a trust, so wallet holders do not appear directly on the issuer’s shareholder register, and redemption depends on identity, sanctions and anti-money-laundering checks. An onchain buyer who has not completed that process can transfer the token but cannot exercise redemption or voting rights.

Issuer notice, but only for some

The SEC order also requires venues to give underlying companies written notice and an opportunity to object before listing a token created by an unaffiliated third party. That provision speaks directly to a dispute that has already played out in public: AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron objected after learning Robinhood had created an AMC-linked token without the company’s approval, and Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited has issued synthetic exposure to more than 190 companies without granting holders ownership or voting power.

Kazmierczak cited the AMC fight as evidence the notice requirement was needed, but noted its limits. The products causing the controversy are synthetic and will not be governed by the new framework at all.

Qualifying venues must also disclose information about operations, trading and affiliated activity, and the SEC granted separate conditional relief from dealer registration to liquidity providers using their own capital in approved AMM pools. The exemption expires after five years, with the agency requesting public comments on possible refinements.

A familiar mismatch

The tension between around-the-clock blockchains and business-hours finance is not unique to equities. In September, DBS and Citi completed a cross-border tokenized-deposit payment from Singapore to New York within minutes on a Saturday, demonstrating that the rails work on weekends even when much of the underlying financial system does not.

For tokenized stocks, the takeaway from RedStone is that the SEC has solved the legal question of whether ownership can live onchain, but not the mechanical question of how those tokens should be priced when Wall Street is asleep. Until overnight liquidity deepens or oracle-based pricing conventions emerge, weekend traders in tokenized equities will be price-takers in pools with no anchor, and the 135.5 hours each week without a primary-market reference will remain the experiment’s quiet risk.