Original Title: The Weekend That Changed Finance
Original Author: Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise
Original Translation: Luffy, Foresight News
I have always believed that the finance industry’s shift to on-chain technology is inevitable.
Blockchain allows for 24/7 trading and instant settlement of assets, with costs far lower than traditional systems. It makes traditional stock trading platforms and T+1 settlement seem incredibly outdated.
But I have always been curious: when exactly will this change occur? And what events will drive the entire system to undergo a complete transformation?
After all, most people do not feel the delays of the existing system at all. When my uncle buys stocks in his Charles Schwab account, he doesn’t care about waiting a day for settlement, nor is he concerned about the complex processes involving mysterious institutions like NSCC, DTCC, Cede & Co. He buys, the stocks appear in his account, simple and straightforward, without any hiccups.
So I once thought that crypto-driven markets would first grow on the fringes. In the next 5 to 10 years, they would mainly serve crypto-native users and those who cannot fully integrate into the traditional financial system, such as retail investors around the world looking to trade U.S. stocks. Eventually, these systems would become good enough to gradually take over the existing system, and institutions like the New York Stock Exchange would slowly shift toward a tokenized market, just like they transitioned from floor trading to electronic trading in the past.
This would be a classic tech story: first disrupting the periphery, then taking over the core. I thought this would take 5 to 10 years.
But this weekend proved me wrong. Now I am convinced that it is all happening much faster than anyone expected.
What Happened This Weekend
At 2:30 AM Eastern Time on Sunday, February 28, Trump announced an attack on Iran. This timing is very special for global financial markets, as almost all markets are closed.
· U.S. stock market closed
· U.S. futures market closed
· Main foreign exchange markets closed
· European markets closed
· Asian markets closed
Basically, the only markets still trading at this time were Middle Eastern stock markets like Saudi Arabia and Qatar (which trade from Sunday to Thursday), but these markets are limited in size and coverage, with little participation from Western investors and not many assets covered.
In the past, if a major geopolitical shock occurred on a Sunday morning, investors would have to wait until 6 PM on Sunday when the U.S. futures opened to find out how the markets reacted. But this weekend showed us: they now have another option, turning to crypto infrastructure that operates year-round and globally.
And this weekend, they really did just that.
All day Sunday, on-chain finance became the core of global finance. In particular, the decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid became the focal point. It offers perpetual contract trading for crypto assets as well as real-world assets like crude oil.
Hyperliquid's trading volume surged to the point where Bloomberg cited the crude oil contract prices on Hyperliquid when reporting on the impact of the airstrikes on oil. This was the most relevant price. This was no coincidence; Hyperliquid's native token HYPE rose by about 30% over the weekend. In my view, this seemed more like investors pre-emptively placing bets on its future.
But it wasn’t just Hyperliquid. The gold token XAUT issued by Tether saw its 24-hour trading volume soar to over $300 million. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket set new trading volume records. Crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum also became focal points.
In my memory, this is the first time in a real sense that the cryptocurrency market truly became a "market."
Why This Matters
If you are a hedge fund, a bank, or any investor looking to remain competitive, you have no choice now: you must open a stablecoin wallet, you must learn to trade on Hyperliquid, you must understand XAUT, and you must study tokenized stocks.
Because even if you don’t, others will.
This trend will accelerate. The biggest barrier to participating in on-chain markets is getting used to tools like wallets, stablecoins, Hyperliquid, and Uniswap. Once you get the hang of it, all the new capabilities of DeFi and on-chain finance are within reach. Exposure leads to exploration, and exploration leads to trading.
Of course, some will say: Traditional markets can do this too! Nasdaq is implementing trading 5 days a week, 23 hours a day! We don’t provide 24/7 trading because no one needs it!
Okay, say what you will. Back in the day, Baidu was saying the same thing about Netflix, and Microsoft had the same opinion about the iPhone.
The shift to on-chain finance is inevitable. And after this weekend, I am convinced: its arrival will be sooner than any of us imagined.
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