News analysis ·
Tokenized stocks after hours: the IMF's risk findings
An IMF study finds most tokenized stock trading happens when Wall Street is closed. We explain the thin liquidity and extra volatility behind it.
Tokenized stocks are digital tokens that follow the price of a listed share, and a new International Monetary Fund study says most of their trading happens while U.S. exchanges are shut. The same study, reported by Unchained and CoinDesk, finds these tokens swing harder and trade more thinly than the shares they track. This article looks at what that means for a small buyer who trades them at night or on weekends.
What the IMF found
The IMF released the work on Oct. 8 as the tokenization chapter of its Global Financial Stability Report. According to Unchained, the fund put the tokenized equity market near $2.3 billion as of July 31. That is a small share of the roughly $65 billion public market for tokenized real-world assets, with repo excluded. CoinDesk set it against SIFMA data showing 2025 global equity market capitalization at just under $160 trillion.
Researchers studied five heavily traded tokens from Ondo Finance and Backed Finance's xStocks. They track two stock indexes plus Tesla, Google and Nvidia shares. Unchained reported that the sample covered 11 venues and 365 trading days, with a value near $345 million, or roughly 15% of all tokenized equity. Between them, Ondo and Backed hold over 70% of the value in this market. Both sell mainly to people outside the U.S.
Two figures stand out. More than half of the trading took place while regular U.S. market hours were closed, CoinDesk reported. And about 80% of the trades involved only a fraction of a single share. To the IMF, that points to a market led by small retail buyers.
The mechanics: a price with no home market open
A tokenized share is meant to mirror a real stock. During U.S. hours, that link is easy to keep, because the real share is trading and anyone can compare prices. When the exchange is shut, the token keeps trading but the reference price stands still. The token price then depends on whoever happens to be buying and selling on that venue at that moment.
The IMF found that these night-time moves still carried real information. After the U.S. open, the underlying stocks reflected more than 87% of the overnight token move within five minutes. In other words, token traders often guessed the direction right. But a correct direction on average does not protect any single trade from a bad fill.
Liquidity is the key word here. It means how easily you can buy or sell without moving the price. The IMF said liquidity was thinnest on decentralized exchanges, with centralized exchanges in the middle. Prices did follow the underlying stocks closely on busier venues. On quieter ones, the gap between the best buy and sell price can be wider, and a market order can fill well away from the last price you saw. Realized volatility, a measure of how much prices actually moved, came in near 1.5 times the level of the regular listed shares.
Where the risk is
The fund summed up the state of the market plainly. In its words, "tokenized equity markets are so far less liquid, more volatile, and more fragmented than traditional ones". For a small buyer, that translates into a few concrete ways to lose money.
- Wider spreads at night: buying on a thin venue and selling later can cost more than the same round trip in the real share.
- Slippage on market orders: with few orders on the book, a buy or sell can fill at a worse price than shown.
- Bigger swings: volatility near 1.5 times the regular shares means a leveraged position can hit a margin call or liquidation faster.
- Fragmentation: CoinDesk reported that platforms, blockchains, custodians and settlement systems frequently fail to connect, so a price or position on one venue may not move easily to another.
The IMF also flagged a wider shock risk. Automatic margin calls, forced liquidations, collateral hopping between platforms and nonstop trading may make turmoil harder to stop, according to CoinDesk. The fund added that systemic risks are limited for now and that its empirical results should be read with care.
Who is building these markets
Access is spreading. CoinDesk reported that Coinbase, Kraken, Binance and Robinhood offer tokenized stock trading, and that Bullish added it in August. In a separate filing made this month, OKX and Intercontinental Exchange plan a 24/7 marketplace for tokenized U.S. shares. More venues can mean more liquidity over time, but they can also split trading across even more places.
What to watch
The IMF's policy ideas give a sense of where rules may head. It suggested building emergency trading halts and liquidity backstops into token venues, and applying equal rules wherever the activity and the risk are equal. Watch whether regulators pick up those ideas, whether the OKX and ICE plan moves forward, and whether volume on the busiest venues grows enough to narrow the gap with traditional shares. Until then, a token that tracks a famous stock does not trade like that stock, especially when its home market is asleep.
Sources
Drafted with an AI model using only the sources listed, and released automatically after software checks on figures and originality. Nobody edited it by hand. For learning only; it does not tell you what to buy or sell.