More than half of trades in tokenised US stocks happen outside regular market hours, and about 80 per cent are for less than one share. Those are findings from the International Monetary Fund’s October Global Financial Stability Report, as CoinDesk summarised it.
The IMF studied the five most actively traded tokenised equities, among them Tesla, Nvidia and Alphabet, across centralised and decentralised venues.
Tokenised shares were about 1.5 times as volatile as the ordinary shares they track, and noticeably less liquid. Price discovery still leans on the old market. More than 85 per cent of overnight moves showed up in conventional shares within five minutes of the US open.
The scale is small. The fund put tokenised real-world assets at about $65 billion at the end of July, of which tokenised equities were roughly $2.3 billion. Global equity market capitalisation is just under $160 trillion.
The benefits it lists are modest and operational: less manual reconciliation, automated dividends, faster collateral moves. The risks are structural. Automated margin calls, collateral hopping between platforms and round-the-clock trading could make a shock harder to contain, and the rules on who legally owns the share are not settled.
The IMF says current risks are limited because the market is tiny. That is a statement about today, not about where the market is heading. Its own sample is five stocks, and the exchanges now filing to trade tokenised shares all night are betting on a very different size.
