Why Wall Street is moving toward 24/7 trading in 2026

0:23I'm Ashton Addison from the Crypto Coin Show. And today on Blockchain Interviews, we're joined by Ian Weisberger, co-founder and CEO of CoinRoutes. Since 2017, CoinRoutes has built the trading technology that big funds use to buy and sell across dozens of crypto exchanges with more than 700 billion in volume through the platform. Last month they launched CRX Trade,

0:46a Swiss prime brokerage that puts crypto exchanges and Wall Street markets like CME and NASDAQ into one account. And with tokenized stocks taking off, Ian is sitting right in the crux between crypto and Wall Street and how that's merging. Excited to dive into that today and so much more. Ian, thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ashton.

1:09Yeah, let's let's dive into this because I've been waiting for tokenized stocks, at least the liquidity behind them, for many years. And I think there's probably a lot of major institutions on the sidelines that have also been waiting for that and more are starting to dip their feet in. Can you give us a rundown of the problem that CoinRoutes solves for big funds

1:31in moving large money in and out of the markets and why that matters more than it did 10 years ago in crypto? Yeah. Well, I if you've been living under a rock, then maybe you wouldn't see all the news of all the different hacks. But I think everyone in crypto, beyond just market trends is worried about, all the all the hacks that are happening. And so, you know,

1:50we've been around through multiple and bear markets. and basically at the end of the day, what the funds are caring about the most now is counterparty risk. So they want to make sure that their funds are safe. And so they need to make sure that they have multiple counterparties that they can trade on. There's also the issue of price and being able to take a really large,

2:08say, $50 million order for Bitcoin and break it up. And we do quite well at that. we've had multiple orders in the billions of dollars that we've been able to work with for our clients over days. if you just go out and call up a market maker and get a quote for that, you're gonna move the market. It's it's gonna be multiple percent of market impact.

2:26but what we're doing is giving every trading firm, not just the larging trading the larger trading firms, even small trading firms. We have some high net worth individuals that are that are trading with us. That's actually our fastest growing segment is these high net worth trader guys, trader people, that just wanna swing around you know, stocks, crypto, et cetera.

2:44Right. And I think at the end of the day, one of the trends that, you know, I've been calling out for a while is you've seen money first, you know, now obviously it was going into AI. before, the past couple days' events, you know, a lot of crypto money had had gone into AI. Now I think actually a lot of the AI money will potentially flow back into crypto.

3:03I think that's why you've seen Hyperliquid Zcash fare relatively well over the last couple of months. I think the risk adjusted returns are are good, but ultimately what people want to do is trade everything 24/7, 365, right? You know, whether it's Tesla or Bitcoin, they don't care. They just they want to be able to trade it in size. Definitely. And I noticed that over

3:23the summer when crypto was consolidating in a lull and AI was going hot. And it's like, can we just make this easier to move from my crypto positions over to equities and then back quickly as well? Yeah, before CRX, you know, if you don't have access to a platform like that, you have to wire money from your, you know, interactive brokers account to whatever

3:45circle to convert it to USDC to send it to Binance. Like it's just a lot of friction. it's a lot of like mental gymnastics to even remember for like if you're one guy or let's say you're two buddies that have like a small fund, it's very difficult to track all of that and to manage manage assets across exchanges. So really The new thing that we're doing now with

4:04CRX is enabling people to have one account, one view. They can automatically move funds from their equities to their futures to their crypto, derivatives, trade, trade kind of whatever they want and make it easy to track everything and transfer. And that's kind of where we see the future of CoinRoutes is really enabling people to just trade across

4:23all these markets. Because at the end of the day, you look at Robinhood is l and NASDAQ are launching, 23/5 trading, right? And pretty soon it's gonna be 23/7 and then it's gonna be almost 24/7. I they're still gonna have to close on for some downtime weekly, but you're gonna see kind of traditional markets doing what crypto used to do. And now crypto is kind of interesting.

4:44They have to figure out okay, what's what's the edge for crypto, right? For these crypto markets. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the 24/7 stock trading? I know some traders that are like, they're like, we don't want all the time because we need to sleep. And they like the market hours and they like the open. They're used to it, especially ones that have been in the market

5:03for 30 years. Yeah, I mean it sucks. Like I know I know because we've had to run a follow the sun and 24/7 desk since 2017. I mean, when we started, I just didn't sleep and my partners didn't sleep. Thank God now we have a team and a large distributed global team. But yeah, it's it's a lot of work and I don't think these traditional asset managers

5:21are really set up for it. I mean, it used to be before, like you have a team in Chicago and New York and they trade US hours, and then you had another team in Hong Kong that traded Asia and London that traded London. Now it's like everyone's trading everything and it's a very different model. That's that's that's the crypto model where every desk has to touch every different asset globally.

5:40And that's it used to be it is in traditional finance more segmented where you know the different people in different places trade the local markets. Now everyone's gonna have to kind of trade everything. Yeah. Yeah, the globalization is crazy. And starting CoinRoutes multiple bear and bull cycles ago, how how do you fare through that? And what does the market

5:59look like as you're in those consolidation periods or Bitcoin's crashing? You know, are the billionaires that love trading, as you say, are they like, sell it all and we'll try to time the bottom? Or do you get lulls and then everyone wants to buy and you guys are not sleeping for weeks? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like it's funny because I've, you know, we've been doing this for almost

6:2010 years now. And, you know, we have some new staff that anytime the market moves 10%, they're freaking out. And I'm like, this is normal. You know, this is normal in crypto. We've we've been through it a lot. I would say the difference now is this market is extremely institutionalized. you have large players like BlackRock and Fidelity that are invested in it.

6:37And so it's just it's here to stay. Like the difference in the beginning, I would say is obviously I'm a I'm a crypto believer. I've been in crypto since 2015. but there were some times where when I thought, is this, is this really, you know, gonna be a thing? But now now there's no question, right? Like there's no question that this market

6:55is here to stay and you know, we're used to these cycles, right? So it's just a very different market from from what it was back before the ETFs existed and back before you had all these institutional asset managers in the space. Right. Yeah, definitely. Say say a fund wants to buy fifty million dollars of Bitcoin. They call up CoinRoutes. How exactly does that work?

7:16And how do you choose where to purchase the Bitcoin from? Yeah. So there's two models. There's the CoinRoutes kind of enterprise model where clients use our software. We provide them a risk management system. So one trader can't blow up their whole book. We provide them trading algos so that they can buy and sell large blocks. We provide them kind of strategies where they

7:35could, let's say, sell Tesla and buy a bit and buy the underlying shares on NASDAQ or through Alpaca or one of those brokers. So it's it's both directional, market neutral, stat arb, like stat arb being like, okay, buy Bitcoin, sell ETH, whatever, stuff like stuff like that. where you're buying and selling baskets. and then the other model is if they're

7:52it's typically if they're smaller, like if they don't have their own treasury management department, then they come to CRX Trade, which is our exclusive prime brokerage partner, and we give them accounts, we give them you know, trading, we can set them up with credit and leverage, and we give them the whole thing. I mean, like I talk about my story personally,

8:09having to manage 10 different accounts between TradFi and crypto. It's a huge nightmare to manage, you know, to have to wire money back and forth and Deal with all of that. A lot of these smaller funds don't have the operational infrastructure. They don't have dedicated treasury management people that are just sitting there moving money around all day and rebalancing.

8:26And for those people, having an all in one one stop shop is super beneficial for them. The other thing is if you wanted to set up something like CRX Trade for your own use, you'd have to go and buy a custodian. You'd have to go set up accounts. You would have to potentially hire someone to just watch it. And so it's much just more cost effective

8:42for them to come to us and we provide it to them out of the box. And the CRX Trade launch, it has ex crypto exchanges, it also has Hyperliquid, derivatives, and then the CME and the Nasdaq. Right, correct. Yeah. So we So d d when you switch to the traditional markets, you're not buying tokenized versions of the stock in that sense. Correct, correct. Yeah. So we actually just settle

9:08it in USDC. So we have brokerage partners for the traditional assets and we can settle with them either. We have our own USDC rails or they, we work with them. and so basically we essentially what happens is like you have USDC on Hyperliquid, you know, Bybit, Binance, whatever you can you can trade derivatives, you can trade Tesla on Bybit, you can trade you know,

9:27whatever Nasdaq, S&P futures on Binance, and you can actually trade the underlying cash equities or CME dated futures as well. And then we just take away and abstract away all the complexity of settling between between traditional and crypto exchanges. How does the how does the collateral So we're handling that. Yeah. work when you have maybe a huge crypto

9:45position and depending on how risky you are with the altcoins, and then you have traditional positions as well. And something around like October tenth last year comes around and there's big spikes in crypto like we've seen. Yeah, so we have a whole risk model in the back end. Essentially, what happens is there you have to kinda the traditional models is very different

10:04from the crypto model. In the crypto model, you put up, let's you put up a hundred thousand dollars of collateral. Typically the most you can lose is a hundred thousand dollars, right? And whether that's in Bitcoin or tether or whatever, like that's how it works. And they have backstop liquidation funds, they have all this complexity behind it. But it is a very different model from

10:20the traditional derivatives markets where you basically have to sign up with the broker and they underwrite your credit. And if you go negative, which you can, then you owe the broker money. And so what we're doing is actually we have a risk model on the back end that allows us to apply the crypto model to traditional finance. So we have a risk engine that we

10:36run where basically a lot of these funds or individuals don't want to deal with the risk of potentially going negative and owing money. We basically make it a fully funded model. And the way that we can do that is by limiting risk on the on the crypto leg. So we ensure that there's always assets that we can used to pay back negatives on the traditional

10:52leg. So we handle all that complexity as well. And I remember a couple of years ago, there was someone who like killed themselves because they went negative on a futures account. Like there's some really dark stuff that happened there. That's really a big problem for people, especially individuals trading futures. They don't quite understand like how that works.

11:08And so we're handling that by basically having a risk engine that makes sure that we always have money to cover on the on the traditional side. Definitely. Yeah. I recall those stories. And I that's why I think having these safety fallbacks in CRX, it sounds important. And what do you think is the threshold for enterprises when, you know, maybe they're small enterprises,

11:31when do they decide that they need to start using something like CRX and CoinRoutes? Yeah, I think it really runs a gamut. I mean, we've had a lot of clients that they just started and they sign up and they and they come to us. And to be honest, we have all kinds. And then we have the biggest, you know, crypto and traditional asset managers.

11:51Like we have a couple banks, right, as well. so it really runs the gamut. Personally, I think that the evolution of our business is more kind of like the mid-market, like the mid-segment. I think that's where people need us the most. That said we love the big enterprises, but quite frankly, it's just there aren't that many of them. Right. And so, as we continue to grow and

12:09scale, it's really, it's really our market to take these mid, mid, mid market type clients. And then obviously people that are starting, we like to grow with them as well. With the growth in tokenized stocks this year, I believe the volume passed twenty five billion, which is fairly small, but it's growing rapidly. What's the appetite for tokenized stocks right now and

12:30what you and where do you think it should be? I just look, there's a huge market for tokenized stocks offshore. The fact is, in the US, sitting, if you're sitting in the US, you don't need it because now your broker already basically lets you trade 24/7. there's no appeal and there's less liquidity on it. But if you're sitting offshore, you don't want to have to have an

12:48account to trade underlying cash equities because now all of a sudden you owe taxes, you have inheritance tax, like you have all these like all this like administrative overhead. It's like not worth it for you to own it. and so you really have this bifurcated market where a lot of people sitting offshore, they don't actually want the underlying voting rights

13:05or whatever. They really just care about the economic interest and they're willing to give up a lot of these other rights. And so you have different classes of tokenized securities. You have xStocks and Ondo, which is basically a wrapper. You don't really get voting rights, et cetera, et cetera. and then you have on the other end of the spectrum you have Securitize,

13:20which requires you, which basically gives you a full security entitlement. You get voting rights, et cetera, et cetera. So you have A lot of different things. and then in addition to that, you have the perps. You have these derivative contracts. And so there's a lot of different things. I think there's a use case for each of them, but ultimately where where these things

13:36are really taking off is on the offshore kind of derivatives and cash market. There's a big use for it there. Definitely. Do you think that tokenized stocks, at least how people discuss it in the US, are overhyped right now? Overhyped is the right word. I do think like some some of this is maybe, but at the end of the day, there's just such a huge demand

13:58for these things offshore for people to be able to access these assets. and there's like it's I think it's gonna be good for the US equity market ultimately, because now even more money can can flow into these into these assets over over the long haul. And if you look at people in a lot of markets, they would rather probably invest in the US market than their local,

14:16their local market. It probably performs better over the long haul and they couldn't, right? until now. And so it's gonna be, it's gonna be super interesting, to be honest. It's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. That said, I think a lot of the benefits of tokenized securities are already being played out in the US by the brokers. The other thing to know is that these

14:34brokers are making a pile of money by keeping assets on their platform and not giving it to a third-party token tokenizer. they're they're if they can hold up your deposit three days, they get three days of free interest, right? So it's not in their benefit to. Allow these things to instantly settle because they're making a lot of money off of it. And so it's gonna be interesting to see

14:53how that hampers hampers the growth or and Definitely. Do you think it or if it matters. Yeah. it's justified the anger from some of the CEOs on looking at the tokenized version of their stock saying we don't really control this like we saw with AMC? Yeah, I don't know. I it's it's like does it really matter for them in the long run? I don't I think I think for

15:11now maybe they just they don't understand it. I think a of people still don't understand digital assets and crypto. I think at the end of the day, it could end up being better for them because at some point because now they actually know how many shares are issued and outstanding. there have been so many like short-selling scandals over the years of brokers lending

15:27out shares that didn't exist, right? And with tokenized securities, that can't actually happen. So I think if they actually understood, you know, what it what was happening, at some point it would be good for them. I really think for them it's a negotiating leverage. they want to say, No, I'm not gonna do this. And then at some point they're gonna say

15:42yes under these conditions, right? That's I think what their tactic is. Cause ultimately, if they get what they want out of it, if they can get some concessions, is it's better for them than than the current system. Yeah. we've seen a huge growth in the tokenized stocks as a percentage of what we're currently calling the crypto markets. And it seems like

16:01it will overtake and soon digital assets, you know, the native crypto assets will be like a little subsector of crypto. And it will just be tokenized stocks will be the majority of the percentage. How quickly do you think that will happen? Yeah, I just looked at Hyperliquid and NASDAQ index derivatives traded the same amount as HYPE and half what Ethereum traded by volume.

16:24So it traded 700 million, HYPE did 700 million, Ethereum did a billion and a half. it in some days, when the gold and silver, when the precious metal thing exploded, it was larger than Ethereum at one point. So it's already getting there. And so what's happening is you're seeing a lot of the liquidity sucked out of altcoins and thrown into, RWAs, right?

16:43And I think that's permanent. I think a lot of these altcoins are just gonna continue to bleed out because ultimately it used to be that people bought these altcoins basically to gamble. and now they're able to invest in actual assets that more track reality. same thing with prediction markets. I think a lot of liquidity went out into prediction markets and sucked out of altcoins.

17:02That said, if you're looking at the blue chip top tier assets like Bitcoin and you know, to some extent Ethereum, maybe even I mean, I don't know. I don't I don't really like Solana anymore. I don't think there's that much of a use case. But look, if you look at something like Hyperliquid, I they're making they're making what, like almost a billion dollars a

17:19year in revenue. I mean, that's pretty good compared to the value that it's at. So I think protocols are gonna have to actually make revenue now in order to be highly valued. Yeah, no, I've we've been waiting for that to be you know, that to have revenue is so important and I think people were delusional in the early days of crypto and just anything that

17:35was just we're just gambling. There's no really rhyme or reason to buy these digital assets. And I don't think the institutions think like that. I'm still bullish on HYPE over the long term. I don't know. I think the market, who knows what's gonna happen with the short-term market, market corrections, market crashes, whatever, but I still think HYPE is

17:53clearly the market leader in that space, category, category creator. And I think there's no reason why it couldn't be valued like the Yeah. No, it's crazy. CME at some point, right? And, with that, it's sort of moving passing the torch from maybe crypto centralized crypto exchanges like Binance and to Hyperliquid. And I think, you know, in part they wanted to keep themselves in

18:14the news when that when the Hyperliquid investment, you know, Druckenmiller was talking about Hyperliquid and Trump's talking about Hyperliquid, and then all of a sudden the Binance hack happens with the six billion dollars. How does that hack Ripple through the market and the institutional desks. And how do they see that when you're trading and then all of a sudden

18:35one of the partners has just lost six billion? Yeah, obviously it's not it's not good for confidence in the system. I mean, it just so happens that it was, you know, they had you know, they've been making billions and billions a year and can cover it. But ultimately what I think is gonna happen is like Binance was one of the only exchanges that didn't support this idea of triparty

18:54settlement. And what that means is an institution can keep their assets with a third party custodian. and that third party custodian isn't going to lend out the assets, what rehypothecate the assets basically. those assets are going to be held for you, for your trading account, and not given to someone else. Whereas if you give your money to the exchange, there's no limitation on if they can

19:12lend it out, they can whatever. They could even take it off the platform and lend it to a hedge fund. I that's what happened with it with FTX, among other things, right? And so, what institutions really want, what our clients really want, is the ability to hold assets in a third-party custodian, right? And we're working on partnerships. We have support for a couple of them with.

19:28the larger custodians where we can basically hold funds in the custodian while trading on exchanges. Binance was basically the only exchange that refused to play ball with those custodians, right? And I think now they're gonna have to they're gonna be forced into it. I think they're gonna be forced to doing it because institutions are are gonna vote with

19:45their feet and trade away. Yeah, and it was interesting to see the markets when the Binance hack happened, Bitcoin and these other assets, you know, it was down like five percent maybe compared to the previous hacks at bigger exchanges. What do you think that says about the resilience of crypto in its current state? I just think people knew that Binance had

20:06the assets to back it up given given how long they've been around and given their their investments. and so, but obviously it's gonna, I mean, it's affecting volumes, like volumes on and market share on Binance were are gonna, you know, continue to go down. I think it's really just gonna matter about like how they respond to it and if they actually make any improvements.

20:23I, you know, I think they probably will. I think they probably will be forced to win back some of the institutional market, support these, these ex the third party custodians, because I think a lot they've they've kind of lost a lot of trust. And basically they came out on Twitter and said we're good for the money. And quite frankly, I believe them.

20:39But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that you'll get the money in a week from now. It matters that you can have the money now when you need to cover a loss somewhere else, right? Like if you're a hedge fund, you have and you're let's say you're market neutral, you're long on Binance, short somewhere else, like you might have you might need to move that money to another

20:56venue, right? You might need that to meet a delivery requirement. You might be an OTC desk and you owe Bitcoin to your client, but you can't pull it off Binance. Then you have to go into some and pay some crazy high interest loan or do something that's bad. it's gonna cost you money to be locked out for a for a week. Right. it's a and it's just a huge reputational risk.

21:13And so I think a lot of them are thinking about it the wrong way when they're saying, hey, like money's safe, but there's never like, okay, when am I gonna get paid out? Like if you look at they have they had a custodian that's owned by Binance and the withdrawals were locked for a week or something, like a lot, a long, long time. and so you know, I think things will change after that,

21:31to be honest. Yeah, no, I agree. And it reminds me of the banks. If you want to take out a large amount of money, they're like, Well, your money's safe, it's here, but this is gonna be a long process for you to get it back. And if you want it today, that's not gonna happen. And that's not what we like in digital assets and moving money.

21:48We want it to be fast. Yeah, that's the whole point, right? That's what we're supposed to be able to do. Definitely. Well, I could see how some of these institutions might not have that trust in Binance moving forward. But there are other also other options besides CoinRoutes like like Coinbase and other major US players that are trying to grab those institutional clients.

22:09You know, what do you say to those that are making the decision on who should we go with? Yeah. Yeah. look, as I said, with all these hacks, people are going to choose multiple counterparties. We know that's the case. And the unique thing about CoinRoutes is you can have your Coinbase exchange connected. You can have Kraken, you can have Binance,

22:26you can have all these counterparties connected, or you can use our you know, brokerage infrastructure, or you can actually do both. And so a lot of clients are doing both. They have they bring their own Binance account, they use us for connecting a Hyperliquid. Like you can kind of mix and match. And the nice thing about that is you just have one platform where you can set

22:43all your risk limits and kind of centralized user management. So some trader doesn't, run off with your funds. and you and you can do both ways. And so I think that's really important to have a single platform where you can bring all your counterparties together and get act market access and trading strategies and whatnot. Because at the end of the day,

23:01traders kind of get used to one platform and it's it's, you know, a lot to jump around from platform to platform for them. Definitely. I having options, and plan Bs, I think, i is very smart. What's the what's the one rule, if not that, that you would give anyone that's moving serious money in crypto today? Yeah, I would definitely think about counterparty risk

23:26in terms of diversifying your counterparty risk and making sure that, you know what your settlement obligations are. it's different if you're an OTC desk and you need to be able to deliver instantly versus if you're a fund and you can, deal with 30-day liquidity, that sort of thing. So it's really important to understand that. And then to understand,

23:43you know, how you're how you're trading it. Like what is your strategy for trading, right? Like if your strategy is calling up an OTC desk. probably you're leaving a lot of money on the table if that's your only strategy and you don't have a trading system. Yeah, well said. Wha what's the best way to learn more about the tokenized stocks and the launch of

24:02the CRX Trade and CoinRoutes overall? yeah, we post a lot on our website. We're pretty active on LinkedIn. we have a newsletter, so you know, can visit us at coinroutes.com Sounds great, Ian. I appreciate to learn more. Thank you so much, Ian, for the time. I really appreciate it. Your insights into the crazy growing world of digital assets, tokenized stocks.

24:22Congrats on the launch of CRX Trade. Keep those institutions safe and happy and move move money fast as the worlds merge between traditional finance and digital assets. so all the best to CoinRoutes. Moving forward and I would love to follow up again in the near future. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was really great, great to chat.