24/7 Clearing for US Stocks Is Here, Cryptocurrency Fails to Get the Entry Ticket
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
24/7 Clearing for US Stocks Is Here, Cryptocurrency Fails to Get the Entry Ticket
The advantage of 24/7 trading in the crypto market is about to be diminished.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Protos
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
For years, the crypto industry has consistently promoted blockchain with the same narrative: digital assets can trade 24/7 without interruption, whereas traditional financial exchanges close at 4 PM and do not resume until the next day.
This week, the world's largest clearing organization thoroughly refuted this argument.
The National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) handling equity business, with DTCC processing securities transactions worth quadrillions of dollars annually.
The latest announcement shows that NSCC has now achieved 24-hour clearing operations every business day. For reference, DTCC processed total securities transactions worth approximately $3.7 quadrillion last year, and its equity clearing system can now handle trades of traditional financial instruments such as stocks overnight.
DTCC is transitioning to an around-the-clock clearing system in phases. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved rule amendments first, and the institution completed customer testing earlier this year; major exchanges such as Nasdaq plan to launch overnight trading sessions sequentially between this year and 2027.
Although NSCC publicly claims to achieve 24/5 operations, the institution admits that while the core clearing system operates uninterrupted, some supporting systems will pause for one hour during business nights for technical maintenance.
This extension of clearing hours by DTCC delivers a huge blow to the crypto industry's core narrative of "never closing." The crypto sector's only remaining differentiated advantage is that DTCC only opens clearing on business days, while the crypto market covers business days plus weekends; if this 5x24-hour implementation runs smoothly and market demand continues to rise, DTCC may not rule out further opening weekend clearing services in the future.
DTCC Repeatedly Disappoints Crypto Believers
Crypto market investors still harbor illusions, with some attempting to interpret this news as positive for the industry: "DTCC officially launches around-the-clock clearing from Monday to Friday, paving the way for comprehensive asset tokenization." Such interpretations are heavily subjective and deviate from the facts.
Although tokenization of traditional assets such as stocks has already seen small-scale pilot implementations, DTCC is under no obligation to use any public blockchain and is more likely to develop its own private distributed ledger.
In fact, this update from DTCC is just another example of it repeatedly disappointing crypto enthusiasts over the years. Whenever DTCC releases any project related to blockchain, the crypto community always forcibly attaches its own optimistic expectations.
For a long time, supporters of public blockchains such as Ethereum and the XRP Ledger have repeatedly predicted that DTCC would complete relevant system integrations, however, relevant implementations have never materialized.
In actual production business system selection, this clearing institution has always prioritized adopting permissioned closed private infrastructure rather than public blockchains. In 2022, DTCC launched the Ion project; this settlement platform was built on a private permissioned ledger and did not use any public blockchain; subsequent various commercial projects also continued the same selection logic.
In December 2025, DTCC partnered with Digital Asset to achieve tokenization of U.S. Treasuries on the permissioned Canton network. Public blockchain developers criticized the solution for its high entry barriers, but this did not change the institution's decision.
Expectations among XRP holders were particularly strong. Protos previously reported that none of DTCC's current clearing businesses are connected to the XRP Ledger. A list publication earlier this year also failed to change the status quo and was only overinterpreted by the Ripple community.
In summary, the world's leading clearing institution successfully implemented an around-the-clock clearing system without using any public blockchain throughout the process, nor did there appear any on-chain business traces that crypto enthusiasts had always predicted.
XRP, which is frequently tied to DTCC by the crypto market, was priced at $1.05 at the time of writing, with a drop of about 20% in the last 30 days, halving directly compared to the price a year ago.
The around-the-clock market of traditional finance went live smoothly relying on existing mature infrastructure, and the crypto industry did not get a share of the entry ticket.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@Protos
