The weekend test

Markets do not sleep anymore, and institutions are catching up.

Last weekend offered another proof of concept. While traditional exchanges sat dark, Hyperliquid’s tokenised assets market recorded nearly $1.4 billion in trading volume over the past two weekends while conventional markets were closed. A demonstration. Geopolitical events land on Saturday mornings. Macro shocks do not consult the NYSE calendar. For a generation of traders raised on continuous, app-native markets, the five-day trading week is an anachronism.

Traditional finance is starting to listen. As we mentioned a week ago in our newsletter, ICE, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, made a strategic investment in OKX valuing the crypto exchange at $25 billion, with plans to let OKX’s 120 million users trade tokenised NYSE equities and U.S. futures. Separately, Nasdaq announced a partnership with Kraken to develop a system for issuing and trading tokenised versions of stocks and other exchange-traded products, with token holders retaining the same voting and dividend rights as ordinary shareholders. Both are structural commitments from some of the most established names in capital markets, acknowledging that on-chain, always-on infrastructure is where volume is migrating.

The pace of that migration is striking. Tokenisation is now a product roadmap.

Yet in the same week that legacy exchanges were racing toward the chain, one of crypto’s own protocols was racing away from it. Across, a cross-chain bridging protocol backed by Paradigm, posted a proposal to transition from a DAO structure to a U.S. C-corporation, offering ACX tokenholders the option to exchange their tokens for equity at a 1:1 ratio. The token, at the time of the proposal, was down 96% from its all-time high of $1.69 reached in December 2024.

A migration back from tokens to equity?

The irony cuts deep. Across is not a marginal project. According to TokenTerminal, it handled $28 billion in transfer volume over the past three years. Its infrastructure works, but its token does not. The team argued that the DAO structure creates friction with institutional partners who require enforceable contracts and a clear legal counterparty, effectively conceding that the token model had become a commercial liability rather than an asset.

This is the split that is now becoming visible. On one side, projects like Hyperliquid and Morpho are doubling down on the token as the fundamental unit of ownership, governance, and value capture. Hyperliquid’s monthly trading volume now exceeds $200 billion, and HYPE has decoupled from the broader crypto downturn, up nearly 24% year to date while Bitcoin has shed more than 23%. The token is working because the platform is working, and the platform is working because it was built, from day one, as a vertically integrated financial system in which the token sits at the centre of every economic decision.

On the other side, a cohort of protocols that built real infrastructure but failed to engineer genuine token utility are quietly retreating to the cap table. Across will not be the last.

The lesson is not that tokens do not work. It is that tokens only work when value has nowhere else to go. Hyperliquid designed that constraint from the start. Most others did not. And as TradFi rushes to tokenise everything on always-on rails, the protocols that could not answer the question of why their token exists will find that equity, in the end, was the more honest answer.