Summary
Tokenization and extended venue hours are removing the daily close that asset managers built their operations around. Many workflows do not need a daily cadence. For those that do, agreeing on a cutoff and bounding the residual difference is faster and safer than rebuilding books, records, and the middle and back office.
Recently, DTCC announced plans for a full October launch of its tokenization service, starting with Russell 1000 names.i Regulation is also moving. In March, the SEC approved Nasdaq's plan to run tokenized and conventional shares of the same companies on one order book.ii Platforms like Robinhood and others already sell stock tokens that trade while US exchanges are closed.
For asset managers, tokenization opens a potential can of worms. Many operational processes are built on the premise of a daily close. Tokenization creates challenges for those processes. But many aspects of daily workflows and data flows are independent of a daily cadence.
The best approach that we're seeing among clients is to separate these two types of cadence. And for those that do require a daily interval, the fix is to agree on a cutoff rather than rebuilding books, records, and the middle and back office.
Sometimes the market uses tokenization loosely. It rarely means full replacement of an equity with a blockchain-native token. The difference lies in what the token holder holds. What DTCC calls a tokenized asset is just the digital version of a security it already holds in custody. The purpose is to increase the asset's fungibility.
In other cases, broker-issued exposure means the broker retains ownership of the underlying shares. Robinhood offered European customers tokens tied to OpenAI shares, backed by a stake it holds through a special purpose vehicle. OpenAI said publicly that the tokens are not equity and that it had approved no transfer of shares.iii
The word also gets used for real-world asset tokens, claims on issuer-held assets like Treasuries or funds, which are different asset classes and different conversations.
The difference in ownership decides how each token moves. When you hold a custody-backed token, the stock register records you as the owner in digital form, so the token must mimic how the underlying share trades and inherit its constraints. But a trade in broker-issued exposure means the underlying share doesn’t change hands. This scenario behaves more like a derivative, without market hours that constrain when it can move.
Tokenization also broadens access, since an investor abroad can trade a listed share directly rather than waiting for a depositary receipt or a fund wrapper.
Rapid settlement is one of the ostensible benefits of tokenization, but translating it to an operating model isn't straightforward. Settlement intervals for traditional instruments are T+1 or T+2, depending on the asset and market. Institutional trades run through an allocation and affirmation chain across managers, brokers, and custodians. In addition, sellers may need to recall lent securities, and foreign investors need an FX leg that has its own settlement cycle.
Without settlement windows and market closes, end-of-day position and P&L reporting no longer have a specific moment to report against. Reconciliation loses the most basic thing it needs, an agreement between counterparties on which moment gets captured. In addition, no team can work 24/7, so the coverage model loses its overnight window. You end up needing to orchestrate regional handoffs to cover Hong Kong, London, and New York.
Compressed time windows put many aspects of the operating model to the test. But not all. For example, the security master doesn't care what time it is. You can just run double-entry bookkeeping as trades happen. From a books-and-records perspective, nothing fundamentally changes either. A token is a coin under the accounting standards, and equity is equity. You can hold 100 shares in a depository account and 50 one-for-one tokens in the same name, then report 150 units of exposure in one combined view of positions and P&L.
Reconciliation shows how acute this challenge can become. When trading stops at a certain time, reports include transactions through that date, allowing you to compare the same batch of data. Side one is your own book of record. Side two is the venue where execution or clearing happens.
To capture the same activity for digitally native assets, both sides would need microsecond perfection in pulling their data. That’s not practical because operational systems introduce their own lag. Misalignment between what the venue pulls and what you pull is an unexpected implication that a daily cadence tends to smooth over.
The misalignment becomes quite granular. Let’s say you put your cutoff at 4:00 P.M. Eastern. Your system takes a snapshot of trading through 4:00, but the insert call that writes data into your book of record starts at 3:57 and completes at 4:00.
A lot can happen inside that three-minute window. Hundreds of trades might fall outside your capture. The venue reports them anyway. Then reconciliation compares two records that both claim to cover everything through 4:00 and don't agree. That's the familiar pattern for addressing breaks.
Defining a cutoff allows you to reproduce the core of that pattern for reconciliation in a tokenized world. First, batch trades executed through 4:00 and deliver them to the book of record by 4:15. That 15-minute buffer gives the capture time to complete, so whatever enters the book by 4:15 contains activity through 4:00 and nothing later. Anything executed between 4:00 and 4:15 pauses, which keeps the next cycle's activity out of this batch.
On the venue side, start the pull at 4:00 as well, rather than waiting for the house side to finish. If the pull takes four to five minutes, the extracted file carries about five minutes of extra transactions. Lock the house data through the P&L run, send both sides to the reconciler, and once the run settles, restart the process for the next batch. This approach gives you a constant anchor point to support your daily process.
Even though the five-minute lag on side two remains, this solution gives you two records that differ by a known, bounded amount. Making it quantified and repeatable is what keeps it operationally manageable. Solving this gap is essential before even considering how to reconcile pricing across continuous markets. If transaction records don't align before valuation comes into play, you won't be able to arrive at a meaningful answer to pricing questions.
Right now, differences happen firm by firm. One might not trade after 4:30 P.M. Another might run until 10 P.M., and a third could trade around the clock. Eventually, the market will have to define a framework for what end of day means, which will plausibly start with players like DTCC.
For the time being, it's also unlikely that any venue will run truly continuously. On the traditional finance side, NSCC's clearing week began running Sunday 8:00 p.m. ET to Friday 8:00 P.M. ET.iv Runbooks for around-the-clock weekday schedules already exist. As that changes, the market will agree where those seams sit.
There is also a jurisdictional question. If you support continuous operations, the receiving end must be ready to accept continuously, but not all jurisdictions support that. Those agreements will take time. Still, operations don't have to wait for that consensus.
Firms that were pioneers in traditional finance books and records, and are now getting into crypto, are well positioned for this. We believe the technology is there; the gap is agreement rather than capability. Until the convention arrives, define your own cutoff, document the residual difference, and treat continuous trading as one more cadence in a book that already runs T+1 beside T+2.
Ankit Mittal
Ankit Mittal is a Principal Solution Architect at Arcesium, where he works closely with clients to design and deliver scalable data, accounting, and analytics solutions for the investment management industry. He partners across client, product, and engineering teams to translate complex business requirements into production-ready implementations. With over a decade of experience in investment management technology, Ankit has led complex platform implementations across traditional asset classes, private markets, and digital assets. He brings deep expertise in data architecture and investment workflows and is focused on helping clients operationalize sophisticated analytics with confidence.
Sources:
i DTCC, 2026. https://www.dtcc.com/news/2026/may/04/dtcc-advances-developm.ent-of-new-tokenization-service
ii Yahoo Finance, 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/nasdaq-gets-green-light-tokenized-111925401.html
iii CNBC, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/openai-robinhood-tokens.html
iv DTCC, 2026. https://www.dtcc.com/news/2026/june/29/nscc-now-live-with-clearing-hours-extended
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