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⚡️ NYSE wants to put Wall Street on-chain, 24/7

Tokenized stocks, stablecoins, and smart contracts enter the rulebook. PLUS: gold hits fresh highs, Bitcoin slips under pressure, tariffs bite U.S. households, and Monero surges as privacy demand rises.

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Cryptopolitan News
January 20, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

NYSE is aring up to launch a 24/7 tokenized version of Wall Street with stable coins and smart contracts, and the entire Wall Street rulebook.

That might mean a revolution in how capital markets are structured: The NYSE recently revealed it’s working on building an entirely on-chain platform for tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs, ultimately hoping to provide around-the-clock trading, instant settlement, and dollar-denominated transactions.

If approved, it would be the first time that the world’s largest stock exchange has operated a blockchain-native venue, combining its well-known Pillar matching engine with a smart contract-based clearing layer.

Think: crypto speed, Wall Street compliance.

The service will include fractional share ownership, 24-hour trading, and tokenized deposits, all supported at launch by the banking heavyweights BNY Mellon and Citi. Now, backed by broker-dealer attested proper representation of tokenized off-chain shares, the same rights (dividends, governance, etc.) could be realized.

ICE (the parent of NYSE) is currently preparing clearinghouses to transact 24/7 with tokenized deposits, part of a larger move to reinvent finance infrastructure for trading, settlement, and custody. Michael Blaugrund, ICE’s VP of Strategic Initiatives, referred to it as

❝

A milestone toward operating a fully on-chain market infrastructure.

The retail world has sent a demand signal: Robinhood’s 24-hour market demonstrated that people want to trade equities after hours. Now NYSE is raising the stakes, with stablecoins, real-time settlement, and deeper liquidity.

Institutional money is already flowing

  • Kraken xStocks, Ondo Finance, BitMEX equity perps, eToro tokenized equities all indicate a boom in real-world asset tokenization.

  • $100B+ RWA market is approaching: Centrifuge estimates that tokenized asset TVL will surpass $100B end of 2026, and over half of the top 20 asset managers will play ball.

  • The tokenized stocks market cap has already exploded 2500% from $16M to over $800M and that’s just the beginning as a name like NYSE legitimizes the rails with their compliance-grade infrastructure.

🪙 Cryptopolitan’s take

For equities, this is the “BlackRock ETF moment.” TradFi just acknowledged the future is not only digital, it’s composable. What NYSE is doing could be a blueprint for how public markets evolve over the course of the next decade.

POLL: Would you trade tokenized stocks 24/7?

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📊 Market Watch

🧾 U.S. tariffs are a tax on Americans

A new analysis from Germany’s Kiel Institute says: American families and businesses are the ones footing the bill for President Trump’s tariffs. Of $200B of e-waste processed last year, 96% of the costs were born at home, not that far-off shores.

Foreign sellers mostly kept prices firm and shipped less, rather than do deals. The result? More expensive at every stage: from importers, to the shelf in the store, to your wallet. Sure, tariffs may be pumping revenue into federal coffers, but it’s American households that are paying the price.

🪙 Gold soars, Bitcoin slumps as trade war tensions flare up

Gold has just hit new record high of $4,739/oz as investors run to safety and out of risk.

In the meantime, Bitcoin sank to just $91.5K, liquidating more than $80M in longs. What sparked it? Trump said he would impose new tariffs on eight European Union nations. Now toss in a warning sign flashing from Japan’s bond market, and suddenly this week’s flight to safety seems much more urgent than normal.

⚖️ Bitcoin’s day of reckoning: Breakout binge or bull trap?

Seasoned trader Peter Brandt doesn’t like the look of the charts, either: he’s thinking we may slide down to $58K–$62K courtesy a rising wedge pattern.

Others are of the belief that BTC’s current move is looking rather familiar when compared to its fake-out in 2022 before a deeper move lower.

But there’s a bullish camp as well, some analysts see that rising U.S. liquidity as potential fuel for a rebound.

 👀 Chart our analyst is watching

As Bitcoin and ETH consolidate and chop back and forth, Monero (XMR) has been printing one of the strongest rallies in the entire cryptocurrency market.

Monero raced as high as $570$, beating its prior 2021 record of just under $518.

What’s driving it?

Capital has been rotating out of Zcash following internal drama at the crypto’s company, leading to a 25% drop in ZEC.

Growth in demand for privacy assets, at a time when regulators are cracking down on surveillance and on stablecoin issuers.

Under the hood:

Bitfinex and Binance notice a growth in XMR spot volumes. Open interest in Monero futures has been rising, too, indicating that this isn’t a run of the mill short squeeze at play, it’s conviction buying. Some are even calling Monero “the privacy version of Bitcoin” in a post-KYC world.

 🐥 Top tweets

🎭 Culture corner

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