IMF Finds Most Tokenized US Stock Trading Happens After Hours

More than 50% of trading in tokenized US equities happens outside regular US market hours, the International Monetary Fund found in Chapter 3 of its October 2026 Global Financial Stability Report. The same chapter measures realized volatility in those tokens at about 1.5 times that of the matching stocks on traditional exchanges.

The sample is small. The products the IMF studied carried about $345 million in market value, roughly 15% of a $2.3 billion tokenized equity market. The IMF's own caution applies to every figure below:

"Given the incipient nature of the market, empirical findings should be interpreted with caution."

What the IMF Measured

The data set covers 365 trading days and more than 2 million price and volume observations taken at five-minute intervals, across 11 centralized and decentralized trading venues. The chart sources list Allium, CoinDesk and IMF staff calculations.

The IMF frames the off-hours share as a benefit to users: market participants get continuous trading, and they use it. More than half of activity lands when Wall Street is shut. The report breaks this volume down further by session, covering after hours, overnight, premarket and weekends. Those per-session splits are not confirmed for this article, so the only firm figure is the share outside regular hours as a whole.

Volatility About 1.5 Times Higher, With a Caveat

Realized volatility in tokenized equities runs about 1.5 times that of the same equities traded in traditional markets, or roughly 50% higher. Venues are fragmented, and the fragmented venues offered significantly weaker liquidity.

The comparison is not like for like, and the IMF says so. The tokens trade around the clock, so their volatility includes price moves during thin overnight and weekend periods. The traditional measure covers regular US hours only. Part of the 1.5x gap reflects the different trading windows, not just the wrapper.

For a trader, this means a tokenized Nvidia or S&P 500 position is moving through hours when order books are thinnest. A larger move on low volume is the expected result of that schedule, not proof that the token has broken from its underlying.

Two Issuers Hold Most of the Market

Concentration is high. Ondo Finance and Backed Finance together account for more than 70% of tokenized equity value. Their products are aimed at investors who live outside the United States.

The IMF's tokenized equity data set counts about 930,000 investors as of July 31, 2026. That number counts unique on-chain addresses holding a nonzero token balance. It does not count people: one holder can control many addresses.

Safeguards for a Market That Never Closes

The IMF's assessment of the current risk is short: "For now, systemic risks remain limited." A $2.3 billion market is small next to listed US equities. The IMF still urges circuit breakers and liquidity safeguards for tokenized trading, because the existing tools were built for exchanges that open and close.

The open question is who would run a halt on a product that trades on 11 venues, some of them decentralized, at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. The report sets out the problem. It does not name the mechanism or the regulator that would carry it out.