Farewell to the Bundling Era: The Global Financial Markets’ Unbundling Revolution
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Farewell to the Bundling Era: The Global Financial Markets’ Unbundling Revolution
The financial industry continues to evolve as it always has, adopting any structure that narrows the gap between when an event occurs and when prices express their opinion on it.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Prathik Desai
Translated by Block Unicorn
Clocks are not a cure for latency. For decades, financial markets have been built around the speed at which information flows. They introduced closing bells, batch settlements, and regional exchanges—reasonable solutions in an era of slow information transmission. But all that has changed. Capital does not wait. Just as water always finds a crack, so too does capital. Financial gravity pulls it toward the fastest path to price information. That is market law. Market participants will not tolerate inefficiency indefinitely.
This is what I’ve observed over the past few weeks while viewing financial market developments from a macro perspective.
In today’s article, I’ll help you understand what has broken apart the old bundled structure of financial markets—and how it is evolving into a more efficient, unbundled structure spanning different venues, packaging formats, and timeframes.
The Shift
I’ve studied finance for over a decade. In the early stages of my learning, I equated traditional stock exchanges with “the market” itself. For most of their history, stock exchanges were where everyone and everything converged: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technology powering markets. They hosted indices tracking constituent stocks and clocks signaling trading hours—telling everyone when they could trade and when they could not.
But that has changed in recent years. In fact, over just the past few weeks, we’ve seen multiple developments confirming this shift.
On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 Index to Trade[XYZ], enabling HIP-3 market makers to launch the first—and only—S&P 500 perpetual derivatives contract on Hyperliquid. The S&P 500 is the world’s most-followed U.S. large-cap index, tracking 500 leading U.S. companies and representing roughly 80% of total U.S. market capitalization—over $61 trillion. It accounts for at least half of global equity market capitalization.
A nearly 70-year-old index, now listed on a market just six months old.
The day after S&P’s announcement, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq’s application to trade and settle fractional shares in tokenized form. Nasdaq is one of the world’s most active trading venues, typically exceeding the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in nominal trading volume—though the NYSE remains the world’s largest exchange by market capitalization.
On March 16, Cboe Global Markets—the operator behind the Chicago Board Options Exchange—filed a proposal with the SEC to launch “24x5 U.S. equity trading.” Its largest operating entity stated it is prepared to offer round-the-clock equity trading as early as December 2026.
But why? Because demand is growing for extended U.S. equity trading hours.
These three initiatives collectively target an outdated, bundled trading architecture. Hyperliquid’s S&P 500 futures market challenges the decades-old norm that investors can only access traditional indices through traditional markets. It also enables 24/7 global trading of one of the world’s most-tracked large-cap indices.
Nasdaq’s tokenized equity initiative targets infrastructure. It introduces a new packaging format, allowing the same stock to be traded in different ways. Previous attempts at tokenized equities drew criticism from industry participants.
Investors questioned whether such tokens conferred the same rights as underlying shares.
But what if I deliver identical equity exposure via a blockchain-based token—without forfeiting the voting rights and legal protections attached to traditional dematerialized shares? Wouldn’t you accept that?
Why would you do it? What’s in it for you?
What if you’re an investor outside the U.S., seeking easier access to the world’s largest economy’s equity market? And what if these tokenized equities let you integrate them seamlessly with collateral and lending systems?
These advantages multiply when combined with 24/7 trading.
That’s precisely what Cboe is addressing. Its 24x5 trading proposal acknowledges that capital doesn’t wait for business hours. Traders always want to express their views immediately upon receiving new information. If Cboe doesn’t provide them a venue to do so, they’ll simply flock elsewhere.
None of this is hypothetical—or some distant possibility. It’s happening now, as we speak.
A Fragmented Future
The adoption of financial product unbundling is most evident in Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market, officially launched in late October 2025.
In just the past month, cumulative trading volume on the HIP-3 market surged by $72 billion—after $78 billion across the prior four months.
In March, Trade[XYZ]’s perpetual markets on traditional financial instruments and equities consistently accounted for 90% of HIP-3’s daily trading volume. Yet that isn’t even the most interesting part.
Over half of Trade[XYZ]’s volume came from perpetual contracts on silver, crude oil, Brent crude, and gold.
Hyperliquid offers a unified platform for trading spot cryptocurrencies and perpetual contracts on both crypto and traditional assets. This not only simplifies trading across a single interface but also delivers higher liquidity, a consistent user experience, and tighter bid-ask spreads.
Traders still want to trade the largest, most popular assets—commodities, publicly listed companies, major private firms, and indices. You may want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, an index tracking the top 100 U.S. non-financial companies, or the S&P 500—all available on Hyperliquid.
HIP-3 decouples the functionality of investing in these assets from legacy exchange infrastructure—while still tracking the original underlying benchmarks. So when you go long on a silver futures contract on HIP-3, its underlying value remains pegged to the Pyth data feed’s price for one troy ounce of silver.
Traders migrated to HIP-3 for silver because HIP-3 makes no distinction between U.S. and non-U.S. participants—and imposes no fixed trading hours. Whenever an event occurs that prompts traders to express a view via asset pricing, HIP-3 provides a venue—regardless of the trader’s location or time zone.
The recent surge in open interest (OI) on Hyperliquid vividly illustrates this outcome. OI measures the total notional value of outstanding derivative positions. Unlike volume—which reflects trading activity—OI reflects trading commitment.
Open interest stood at $1.13 billion on March 1 and doubled to $2.2 billion by April 1—indicating traders’ strong confidence in Hyperliquid’s perpetuals and their willingness to lock up capital.
These metrics show that when market access becomes easier and friction lower, traders won’t remain loyal to any single platform or asset class. They’ll choose whichever platform delivers volatility, convenience, and liquidity.
That’s why traditional institutions like S&P, Nasdaq, and Cboe are taking steps to acknowledge this behavior.
At least two recent events underscore the importance of 24/7 trading and market volatility for traders.
Saurabh wrote on Decentralised.Co: “On February 28, the U.S. and Israel struck Iran during traditional market hours—while markets were closed. Within hours, oil-linked perpetuals on Hyperliquid spiked 5% as traders priced in the shock in real time.”
Within just two weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, trading volume in oil-linked perpetuals surged from $200 million to a cumulative $6 billion.
A major concern with emerging platforms is liquidity. Insufficient liquidity can widen bid-ask spreads, placing traders at a pricing disadvantage relative to other venues.
Two weeks ago, as former U.S. President Trump reportedly engaged in talks with Iranian officials about holding “productive discussions,” Hyperliquid demonstrated robust liquidity. Its newly launched S&P 500 futures on the HIP-3 platform tracked the CME E-mini S&P 500 futures almost perfectly—down to the minute.
Although the on-chain perpetuals traded ~50–70 points below ES, their price movements closely mirrored those of the underlying.
What This Means
For decades, traditional markets remained bundled—controlling venue (exchanges), time (trading hours), and products (indices/contracts).
They maintained this status quo because they failed to build mechanisms addressing inefficiencies like latency, trading-hour constraints, and regulatory barriers for non-U.S. investors. Instead, they masked these inefficiencies—packaging them as procedural safeguards designed to foster trustworthy institutions and attract investors.
People continued trading and investing—not because they were naive or easily swayed by traditional finance’s rhetoric—but because they had no alternative. That began changing with blockchain, which delivered on-chain markets that made trading and investing unprecedentedly accessible.
People saw that choice—and seized it.
They never cared—and never will care—about structural changes in markets. Whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled is irrelevant to them. Regardless of institutional preferences, traders and investors will embrace any new market structure that lets them express views through financial instruments more conveniently. It doesn’t matter whether that structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, Cboe, or the S&P 500—or from permissionless platforms running on blockchain.
Finance continues evolving—as it always has—and will adopt any structure that narrows the gap between an event occurring and its price expression.
Important events happen globally, around the clock. So why should prices wait until a clock starts ticking on Monday morning inside a glass-walled building in New York?
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