Written by: Protos

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

For years, the cryptocurrency industry has promoted blockchain with a uniform message: digital assets can be traded 7×24 hours non-stop, while traditional financial exchanges close at 4 PM and do not resume until the next day.

This week, the world’s largest clearing institution completely refuted this claim.

The National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) focused on stock operations, handling securities transactions worth trillions of dollars annually.

The latest announcement indicates that NSCC has now achieved 24-hour clearing operations every business day. For reference, DTCC processed approximately $37 trillion worth of securities transactions last year, and its stock clearing system can now process transactions for stocks and other traditional financial instruments overnight.

DTCC is transitioning to a round-the-clock clearing system in phases. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) previously approved rule amendments, and earlier this year the institution completed client testing; mainstream exchanges like Nasdaq plan to roll out nighttime trading periods from this year until 2027.

Although NSCC claims to operate 24 hours a day for five days a week, the institution admits that while the core clearing system runs continuously, some supporting systems will pause for an hour at night for technical maintenance.

DTCC’s extension of clearing hours presents a significant challenge to the cryptocurrency industry’s core narrative of “never closing.” The only remaining differentiating advantage for the crypto sector is that DTCC only opens clearing during business days, while the cryptocurrency market can cover both business days and weekends; if this 5×24 hour system operates smoothly and market demand continues to rise, DTCC does not rule out further opening weekend clearing services in the future.

DTCC repeatedly disappoints cryptocurrency enthusiasts

Cryptocurrency market investors still harbor illusions, with some attempting to interpret this news as a positive for the industry: “DTCC has officially started 24-hour clearing from Monday to Friday, paving the way for comprehensive asset tokenization.” Such interpretations strongly reflect subjective desires and deviate from the facts.

While there have been small-scale pilots for the tokenization of traditional assets like stocks, DTCC is under no obligation to choose any public chain and is more likely to develop a private distributed ledger in-house.

In fact, this update from DTCC is merely another example of its history of disappointing cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Whenever DTCC announces any blockchain-related projects, the crypto community invariably imposes its own optimistic expectations.

For a long time, supporters of public chains like Ethereum and XRP led predictions that DTCC would integrate related system connections, yet such implementations have never materialized.

In terms of actual production business system selection, the clearing institution has consistently prioritized adopting an entry-restricted closed private infrastructure over public chains. In 2022, DTCC launched the Ion project, which is built on a private permissioned ledger and did not choose any public chain; subsequent commercial projects have followed the same selection logic.

In December 2025, DTCC partnered with Digital Asset to achieve the tokenization of U.S. Treasuries on the permissioned Canton network. Public chain developers have criticized the high entry barriers of this scheme, yet it has not changed the organization’s decisions.

The expectations of XRP holders are particularly strong. Protos previously reported that DTCC’s current clearing operations do not incorporate the XRP ledger. An earlier public listing also did not alter the situation, only being overly interpreted by the Ripple community.

In summary, the world’s leading clearing institution successfully implemented a round-the-clock clearing system without utilizing any public chain and did not show any traces of on-chain business that cryptocurrency enthusiasts have long anticipated.

XRP, which is frequently associated with the cryptocurrency market and DTCC, had a price of $1.05 at the time of writing, having dropped about 20% in the last 30 days, and halved in price compared to a year ago.

The round-the-clock market in traditional finance has been smoothly launched based on existing mature infrastructure, while the cryptocurrency industry has not gained an entry ticket.