Wall Street Sleeps 80% of the Week. Tokenized Stocks Keep Trading.
Regular U.S. stock trading occupies just 19.3% of the week but captures 87.2% of equity volume.
Summary:
- RWA perpetuals extend equity-linked trading beyond regular U.S. hours.
- Overnight prices tracked the post-Fed cash open closely but overshot after a separate regulatory catalyst.
- Weekend trading reached billions around index events and pre-IPO companies.
Binance Research’s September 22 report, Beyond the Closing Bell, shows what is increasingly happening during the remaining hours: RWA-linked perpetuals are absorbing billions of dollars in trading around Fed decisions, regulatory announcements, index changes and even private companies before Wall Street reopens.
$1.02 Billion Traded Before Wall Street Reopened
The Federal Reserve’s September 16 decision provided the clearest test.
The FOMC raised its target range by 25 basis points to 3.75%-4.00% in a unanimous 12-0 vote. The dot plot delivered the more hawkish signal, with 16 of 18 participants projecting at least one additional increase before year-end. The 10-year Treasury yield had climbed from 4.76% at the start of September to 5.01% on the day of the meeting.
The announcement arrived two hours before the regular U.S. close, leaving enough time for an initial reaction but not the full overnight adjustment. Between Wednesday’s close and Thursday’s open, the SPY-linked perpetual gained 1.11%, TMF rose 2.45%, TBT fell 1.32% and UVXY dropped 5.94%.
Across 16 instruments, the median perpetual captured 97% of the subsequent cash-market opening gap. SPY reached 91%, QQQ 97% and IWM 99%. All 16 contracts moved in the same direction as the following opening gap, while $1.02 billion traded during the period when U.S. cash markets were closed.
The sample is small and tied to one macro event, so the 97% figure should not be treated as a general forecasting rule. It does show that most of the measured adjustment in this episode had already occurred before the next regular session began.
The Next Overnight Trade Overshot the Open
The following evening produced a useful counterexample.
After the SEC issued its Innovation Exemption for qualifying tokenized-stock venues on September 17, crypto-exposed equity perpetuals moved sharply. HOOD gained 4.67%, CRCL 4.43%, BMNR 4.18%, MSTR 4.04% and COIN 3.24%, while SPY slipped 0.16%.
The direction carried into regular trading, but the magnitude did not.
The median perpetual had priced 140% of the eventual opening gap. COIN and MSTR then advanced 8.7% and 12.5%, respectively, during Friday’s session.
The contrast with the Fed episode exposes the trade-off in off-hours markets. Continuous derivatives provide somewhere to express a view immediately, but thinner liquidity can push the initial adjustment beyond the price established once deeper cash-market liquidity returns.
A Closed Weekend Generated $7.25 Billion in Trading
The same market is developing beyond weekday overnight sessions.
During the closure surrounding the September 21 S&P Dow Jones Indices rebalance, 198 TradFi perpetuals generated $7.25 billion in volume. Index additions gained an average 1.01%, compared with 0.39% for SPY-linked exposure.
Yet the busiest contract was not the strongest performer.
READ MORE: Binance Pushes Into Forex With 24/7 Perpetual Futures
SNDK recorded $744 million in notional volume, the highest among the additions highlighted by Binance Research, but gained just 0.30%, trailing SPY. The rebalance itself had been announced on September 4, so the weekend activity represented positioning around a known event rather than a reaction to fresh inclusion news.
The $7.25 billion total therefore captures a different use case for 24/7 markets. Investors were not waiting for new information. They were adjusting individual equity-linked exposures while the securities themselves remained unavailable in regular U.S. trading.
Anthropic Trades Before Anthropic Has a Stock
Pre-IPO perpetuals push the model beyond publicly listed securities.
Anthropic has no public float, yet derivatives linked to the company are already generating hundreds of millions of dollars in trading.
After reports that its IPO timetable had shifted to November, Binance’s ANTHROPICUSDT perpetual declined just 0.89%, from $2,103 to $2,084, over the weekend. An OpenAI-linked perpetual gained 3% over the same period. Binance Research notes that the muted Anthropic move was consistent with some of the delay already being anticipated, though the price action cannot establish how much had been priced in beforehand.
Activity has accelerated ahead of any public listing. Across 12 venues, Anthropic perpetual volume reached $643 million in September month-to-date, already above August’s $590 million. Binance accounted for 32% of September volume and 39% of industry open interest, while open interest on Binance rose 88% over 30 days, from $16.6 million to $31.2 million.
The growth of pre-IPO perpetuals extends beyond Anthropic. CoinGecko found that perpetuals have become the dominant trading format across tokenized equities, generating $376.3 billion in volume compared with $7.5 billion for spot products, although liquidity remains heavily concentrated across a small number of assets and venue
The contract has also gained 45.5% since August 1, rising from $1,437 to $2,091.
None of those figures represent trading in Anthropic shares. The perpetual provides derivative exposure to a pre-IPO price view and gives holders neither ownership of private shares nor entitlement to an eventual IPO allocation.
The Closing Bell Is Becoming a Liquidity Boundary
Traditional exchanges still control the deepest pool of equity liquidity. Regular U.S. sessions capture 87.2% of volume, and the difference between the 97% Fed result and 140% SEC overshoot shows why the cash open still matters.
What has changed is the waiting period. A macro decision can be repriced overnight, investors can reposition around an index event during the weekend, and a private company can develop a continuously traded derivative price before its shares reach an exchange.
The numbers worth following from here are off-hours volume, open interest and the gap between perpetual prices and the underlying market once regular liquidity returns. Those measures can show whether the activity develops into a durable market layer rather than simply migrating around individual news events.
The closing bell still marks when most U.S. equity liquidity disappears. It no longer guarantees that price formation stops with it.
The information presented in this article is intended for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as financial, investment, or trading advice. Coinspress.com does not promote or advocate for any particular investment strategy, asset, or cryptocurrency project. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile and unpredictable – always perform your own research and seek guidance from a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
