Farewell to the Bundling Era: The Breakup Revolution in Global Financial Markets

The financial industry continues to evolve, just as always, and will adopt any structure that can narrow the gap between events happening and the way price reflects opinions.

Written by: Prathik Desai

Compiled by: Block unicorn

A clock is not a cure for latency. For decades, financial markets have been built around the speed at which existing information is transmitted. They introduced closing bells, batch settlement, and regional exchanges, which made sense in an era when information traveled slowly. But all of this has changed. Capital doesn’t wait. Just as water always finds a way through cracks, capital does too. Financial gravity pulls it toward the fastest path to price information. Those are the rules of the market. Market participants will not tolerate inefficiency forever.

This is what I’ve been seeing over the past few weeks as I’ve been observing the evolution of financial markets from a macro perspective.

In today’s article, I’ll help you understand what broke the old bundled structure of financial markets—turning it into a more efficient, unbundled structure that spans different locations, wraps, and time.

Switching jobs

I’ve been learning finance for more than ten years. In the early stages of my study, I always saw traditional securities exchanges as synonymous with “the market.” For much of their history, securities exchanges have been where all people and all things converge: buyers, sellers, regulators, and the technology that drives the market. There are indexes that track component stocks, and clocks that signal trading time—telling everyone when they can trade and when they can’t.

But this has changed in the past few years. In fact, just over the past few weeks, we’ve already seen multiple developments that confirm this shift.

On March 18, S&P Dow Jones Indices licensed the S&P 500 index to Trade[XYZ], allowing HIP-3 market deployers to launch the first and only S&P 500 perpetual derivatives contract on the Hyperliquid exchange. The S&P 500 index is the most widely watched U.S. large-cap stock index globally, tracking 500 of America’s leading companies, covering about 80% of the total U.S. market capitalization, with a market cap exceeding 61 trillion. The index covers at least half of the market capitalization of global stock markets.

This is an index with nearly 70 years of history, yet it’s being listed on a market that was launched only 6 months ago.

The day after S&P announced this news, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Nasdaq’s application to trade and settle certain stocks in token form. Nasdaq is one of the most active trading venues in the world; its nominal trading volume typically exceeds the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which has the largest market capitalization among exchanges globally.

On March 16, Cboe Global Markets submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch “nearly 24x5 (24x5) U.S. stock trading.” The largest operating entity behind this American financial exchange said it is ready to provide all-day stock trading services as early as December 2026.

But why is this happening? More and more people are demanding longer trading hours for U.S. stocks.

Together, these three initiatives target the outdated bundled trading structure. The S&P 500 index futures trading market launched by Hyperliquid challenges the convention from decades of investors being able to trade traditional indices only through traditional markets. It also makes it possible to trade 24/7 one of the most tracked large-cap indices worldwide.

Nasdaq’s tokenized stock trading initiative targets infrastructure. It introduces a new form of wrapping that allows the same stock to be traded in different ways. Prior attempts at tokenized stocks have been criticized by the industry.

Investors are questioning whether these tokens have the same rights as the underlying shares.

But if I can provide the same equity exposure through tokens on a blockchain, while also not losing the voting rights and legal protections that come with the original de-tokenized stock—wouldn’t you accept that?

Why would you do this? What’s in it for you?

So, what if you’re an investor outside the United States and you want easier access to the stock markets of the world’s largest economy? What if tokenized stocks could make it easier to integrate them with collateral and lending systems?

When you factor in all-day trading, these advantages multiply.

This is what Cboe is pushing back against. Its nearly 24x5 trading plan—5 days a week, 24 hours a day—is designed to acknowledge that capital doesn’t wait for office hours. Traders always want to express their opinions immediately after receiving information. If Cboe doesn’t provide the market for them to express their views, then traders will flock to other platforms that do.

Everything I’ve said is not hypothetical, and it’s not “something that might happen in the near future.” It’s happening—right now, as we speak.

A split future

In Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market, the adoption of splitting financial products is most evident; this market was only officially launched in late October 2025.

In just the past month, the cumulative trading volume in the HIP-3 market increased by 72 billion. The cumulative trading volume for the previous four months was 78 billion.

In March, Trade[XYZ]’s perpetual markets on traditional financial instruments and stocks continued to account for 90% of HIP-3’s daily trading volume. But that’s not the most interesting part.

More than half of Trade[XYZ]’s trading volume comes from perpetual contract markets for silver, crude oil, Brent crude oil, and gold.

Hyperliquid provides a unified trading venue for trading spot crypto as well as perpetual contracts for both crypto and traditional assets. This not only simplifies trading workflows on a single platform, but also brings higher liquidity, a unified user interface, and tighter bid-ask spreads.

Traders still want to trade some of the largest and hottest assets—covering commodities, listed companies, large private firms, and indices. You might want to trade silver, gold, crude oil, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google, indices tracking the top 100 non-financial U.S. companies, and the S&P 500 index—everything can be done on the Hyperliquid platform.

HIP-3 separates the ability to invest in these assets from the existing exchange infrastructure, while still tracking their original benchmark assets. Therefore, when you go long a silver futures contract on HIP-3, the underlying asset it tracks is still tied to the value of one ounce of silver in the Pyth data source.

Traders move from the previous platforms to trade silver on HIP-3 because HIP-3 does not distinguish between U.S. and non-U.S. traders and it does not follow any specific time. Whenever an event occurs where traders want to express their opinions through asset pricing, HIP-3 provides them with a market—regardless of the trader’s location or time zone.

Over the past few weeks, open interest (OI) on the Hyperliquid platform has grown significantly, fully reflecting the results above. OI measures the total value of outstanding derivatives positions. Unlike volume, which reflects trading activity, OI reflects trading commitment.

On March 1, open interest was 1.13 billion; by April 1, it doubled to 2.2 billion. This indicates that traders are confident in Hyperliquid perpetual contracts and are locking in capital.

These metrics show that when market access becomes easier and friction decreases, traders won’t remain loyal to any single platform or any single asset class. They will choose whatever platform can provide volatility, convenience, and liquidity.

That’s why traditional institutions such as S&P, Nasdaq, and Cboe are taking steps to acknowledge this behavior.

At least two recent incidents have demonstrated how important all-day trading and market volatility are to traders.

Saurabh wrote in a tweet on Decentralised.Co: “On February 28, during the time when U.S. and Israeli markets were closed for trading, attacks on Iran occurred. Within hours, the price of oil-linked perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform jumped by 5%, because traders digested the shock in real time.”

Just two weeks after the war broke out, the trading volume of oil-linked perpetual contracts surged from 200 million to a cumulative 6 billion.

One major risk for emerging platforms is liquidity. If liquidity is insufficient, bid-ask spreads can widen, putting traders at a pricing disadvantage that is more severe than on other platforms.

Two weeks ago, as U.S. President Trump was consulting with Iranian officials about holding a “productive meeting,” the Hyperliquid platform demonstrated its strong liquidity. Newly launched S&P 500 index futures based on the HIP-3 platform can precisely track the movement of the CME E-mini S&P 500 index futures—down to the minute.

Even though the on-chain perpetual contracts are about 50–70 points lower than ES, the magnitude of price movements is very similar.

What does this mean

For decades, traditional markets have been bundled together, controlling where (exchanges), when (trading sessions), and what products (indices / contracts).

They chose to maintain the status quo because they failed to build the corresponding mechanisms to address inefficiencies such as time delays, trading time restrictions, and regulatory limitations on non-U.S. investors. Instead, they covered up these inefficiencies and packaged them as procedural institutions intended to create trustworthy organizations—thereby attracting investors.

People will still trade and invest. This isn’t because they’re stupid, or because they blindly believe all the claims marketed by traditional financial markets. They do it because they have no choice. This situation started to change after blockchains arrived, because blockchains provide the world with on-chain markets, making trading easier than ever before.

People saw this option—and they took it.

In the past, they didn’t care; in the future, they won’t care either about changes in market structure. Whether the new structure is bundled or unbundled doesn’t matter to them. Whether existing institutions are willing or not is irrelevant—as long as traders and investors can express their views more conveniently through financial instruments, they will accept the new market structure. As for whether this structure comes from traditional giants like Nasdaq, Cboe, or S&P 500, or from permissionless platforms running on blockchains—that also doesn’t matter.

The financial industry continues to evolve, just as always, and will adopt any structure that can narrow the gap between events happening and the way price reflects opinions.

Important events happen everywhere, every moment. So why should prices wait until a clock inside a glass-walled office building in New York starts ticking on Monday morning to become determined?