The following is a guest post and opinion from Jamie Elkaleh, CMO at Bitget
In Hong Kong, hours before the New York open, an investor buys a $1 slice of Tesla directly from a self-custody wallet. No broker, no FX spreads, no trading window. Thanks to tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs offered through Ondo Global Markets and integrated into wallets like Bitget, Wall Street is quietly becoming a 24/7, on-chain market.
Within a few years, wallets—not brokers—will be the default portal to U.S. equities for non-U.S. investors.
The parallels to equities are clear. Just as stablecoins extended dollar liquidity worldwide, tokenized equities could extend Wall Street’s reach. Instead of only holding dollars in wallets, users may soon hold fractional shares of Apple, Tesla, or the Nasdaq index—assets priced in dollars but tradable 24/7, outside U.S. trading hours.
For decades, access to U.S. markets required intermediaries like brokers, bank accounts, and jurisdictional approval. Today, the entry point is a crypto wallet.
Wallets are evolving into financial gateways, combining payments, savings, and investments. A worker in Lagos or Manila can receive a stablecoin remittance, pay bills, and allocate leftover funds into tokenized S&P 500 shares—all inside the same app.
Liquidity has long been the breaking point for tokenized assets. Early experiments failed less from lack of interest than from shallow trading depth. New models seek to solve this by linking on-chain tokens directly to traditional market liquidity. Whether that scales remains uncertain.
Regulation is equally unresolved. Access today is mostly limited to non-U.S. users and often requires KYC or eligibility checks. Investors should confirm how dividends, splits, and voting rights are handled, and which custodian safeguards the underlying shares.
The transformation boils down to three key shifts.
Tokenized equities are creating always-on access to Wall Street, extending traditional markets into a 24/7 trading environment.
We’re witnessing the rise of wallet-first investing, where wallets are evolving into the default gateway that seamlessly combines payments, savings, and equity investments in one interface.
Compliance will determine scale—the speed of adoption ultimately depends on how quickly regulators clarify eligibility requirements, custodianship standards, and voting rights for tokenized securities.
Finance is moving toward a faster, borderless model. Stablecoins proved it with dollars; tokenized securities are now testing it with stocks.
The endgame may be simple: a paycheck arrives as stablecoins, a portion auto-swaps into a tokenized S&P 500 index, and everything sits in a wallet—dollars, equities, and crypto—coexisting in the same digital environment.
Wall Street won’t disappear, but its clock is being reset. The opening bell is giving way to a 24/7 on-chain economy.
