Every single day, more than 15 trillion dollars worth of assets are traded on exchanges around the world. Naturally, people will ask what an exchange actually is, and the answer is somewhat disappointing. Years ago, it was a bunch of people shouting numbers at each other in large public pits, but today: it’s a digital notepad. It’s a notepad with a list on it. You tell the notepad “I want to buy 100 shares of Apple at $195,” and someone else tells the notepad “I want to sell 100 shares of Apple at $195,” and the notepad goes “great” and connects the two orders and writes it down. That’s it. That is every central limit order book exchange in the world; it is, at its core, a very expensive notepad.
The notepad is, admittedly, very fast. Nasdaq can match orders in microseconds and faster. There are entire firms whose competitive advantage is being located slightly closer to the notepad, physically, in a data center in New Jersey, because light is fast but not that fast, and if your distance from the notepad is a few feet shorter, you get to trade a few microseconds earlier. People have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this. It is one of the funniest arms races in modern capitalism. But here’s the thing about the notepad: it closes. The New York Stock Exchange opens at 9:30 AM and closes at 4:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday. If you want to buy Apple stock at 2 AM on a Saturday because you had a sudden insight about the future of spatial computing, you cannot do that. You have to wait until Monday while the notepad sleeps.
When the trade finally goes through, it takes a full business day to settle. The U.S. moved from T+2 to T+1 in May 2024, years of industry coordination to shave off “one business day”...24 hours. Tokyo and London are still on T+2. You can send a photo across the planet in seconds, but moving a stock between brokerage accounts takes one to two business days, a clearinghouse, and possibly some guy named Dave at the DTCC.
The Monaco Moment
Monaco is a notepad that doesn’t close. It’s an exchange that executes orders in <1ms, settles in about 400ms (for context, T+1 settlement is ~200,000x slower), and runs 24/7/365. It is the engine powering spot trading, perpetual futures, prediction markets, and tokenized real-world assets, all flowing through one unified trading network.
Compliance can be built into the smart contract layer: KYC/AML for regulated securities and commodities, institutional-level reporting, and GENIUS-compliant execution all working together. One of the core design choices is that compliance can be applied selectively. Trading crypto-native tokens doesn’t require handing over your passport.
Trading tokenized Nvidia shares may. This is how traditional exchanges already work, just implemented onchain, with the complexity hidden behind the action.
The core builders of Monaco come from Goldman Sachs, GSR, Jump Crypto, Hudson River Trading, Point72, Robinhood, and Meta. It’s the kind of team that’s invested and traded billions of dollars, and built applications that have attracted the attention of millions of users. It’s also the kind of team where half of them used to build the systems that the other half used to trade against, which is either a very good sign, or the setup for a very interesting corporate retreat.
Why Now?
This is where someone says “we should put the notepad on a blockchain” and you are allowed to groan. But stay with me, because something happened that the crypto world spent years predicting: the institutions actually showed up. In July 2025, the GENIUS Act became the first major federal framework for stablecoins. In September, Nasdaq pushed for tokenized securities trading. In December, the DTCC (yes, that DTCC) began tokenizing $87tn+ in securities under custody. In January 2026, the NYSE announced 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs. Just days ago, the NYSE named Securitize as its first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain-native securities on the platform, pending SEC and FINRA approval.
Read that again. The New York Stock Exchange, a 233-year-old institution, is partnering with a crypto-native firm to issue tokenized stocks. The people who run the notepads have decided they want new notepads. The line between DeFi and TradFi isn’t blurring. It’s dissolving.
What’s emerging is just finance, for a global, 24/7 world. The current generation of onchain exchanges proved something important: perpetual futures trading works onchain. But they built for one user, the crypto-native degen, and they built accordingly. No KYC, weak geo-blocking, limited collateral, no path to regulated markets (shunning institutional capital). That’s fine for memecoins. It is structurally incapable of handling $60tn+ in U.S. equities. The infrastructure institutions need for this new era is still being built, and the difference between Monaco and what came before is structural.
Think it, trade it. The zero-to-one innovation of crypto was self-custody. No need to trust a central party to hold your assets; only you control your digital assets. That was a genuine breakthrough. What happened next was less exciting. Builders made a hundred versions of the same product.
Wrapped tokens. L2s that are really L3s that are technically sidechains. Every protocol emphasized its technical chops rather than asking: does this solve a real problem for a real person? This goes beyond decentralization to become value fragmentation. At the end of last year, nearly 50% of the 1.5 billion global iPhone users had activated Apple Pay. Very few know how NFC technology actually works. They don’t need to, in order to pay for their overpriced Starbucks. The technology disappears behind the action. You think “I want to pay,” and then you pay. Trading onchain today is the opposite.
Wallets, bridges, wrapping, dozens of perpetual futures on the same asset, thousands of liquidity pools. The gap between wanting to trade and actually trading is enormous. The right version should work like Apple Pay. Think it, trade it. Everything else is plumbing, and good plumbing is invisible. But good plumbing also needs to go where the water is. The ‘real market’ isn’t the offshore, non-KYC, permissionless venue. It’s not pseudonymous traders levering up 100x on memecoins at 3 AM, nor armchair geopolitical specialists choosing between four oil perp contracts. That market exists, but it’s not the market.
The market: $60tn+ U.S. equities. $8-10tn retail commodities. $3tn+ global private credit. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Fidelity. Those institutions aren’t going to trade on a venue with no KYC. Not because they’re old-fashioned, but because facilitating money laundering and financing terrorism is an existential risk. The kind that gets exchanges shut down and executives indicted.
The funny part: most retail users are already used to this. Venmo requires ID. Robinhood requires your SSN. Plaid connects your bank account and credit card details, and no one thinks twice about handing over identification. Nobody riots. The idea that KYC is antithetical to the future of finance is a position held mostly by people who have never had to explain a suspicious activity report to a regulator.
The Cost of Capital
Retail traders probably don’t think much about capital efficiency. Institutions think about almost nothing else. It quietly fuels trillions of dollars of revenue every year for institutions whose names you’d recognize, and mostly consists of figuring out how to make the same dollar do two things at once. Banks have entire desks dedicated to balance sheet management and funding optimization under regulatory capital requirements, to maximize return on capital. The question that keeps a prime broker up at night: “how much of my capital is sitting idle because it’s locked up as margin on one venue when it could be put to work somewhere else?”
Today, if you’re trading perps on one exchange and spot on another and prediction markets on a third, your capital is fragmented across all three. Every exchange is a little island. You can’t use a profitable position on one to margin a trade on another. This is not how Wall Street works, and it’s a dealbreaker for the institutions that move size: especially for the adoption of tokenized equities and commodities.
Monaco runs everything through one order book: unified, cross-asset, and multi-instrument margin. A tokenized equity position can collateralize a perpetual futures trade, and allow traders to put on a delta-neutral funding trade on their favorite tech stock. A money market fund token can back a commodities position. And here’s where it gets interesting: prediction markets.
Long-dated prediction markets are extremely capital-intensive. Bet $10,000 on something that resolves in six months, and that capital is just... sitting there. Dead and unproductive. But that position isn’t worth zero. It has a probability-weighted expected value. A volatile dollar is worth less than a stable dollar for margining purposes, but it’s not worth $0. It might be worth 60 cents on the dollar. In a portfolio margin framework, that position could collateralize other trades, dramatically improving capital efficiency.
This sounds abstract until you realize it’s the difference between needing $100mm to run a strategy versus $40mm. At institutional scale, capital efficiency is the product.
PitPass: Powering Revenue
There is a basic truth about markets that many occasionally forget: people respond to incentives. This sounds obvious, and it is, but a surprising number of protocols are built as though users will magically show up out of loyalty rather than because the economics make sense.
PitPass is Monaco’s incentive layer, the mechanism through which revenue is shared directly with the builders and traders. There are two components to PitPass: BuilderCodes and TraderCodes. BuilderCodes allow anyone who builds a frontend on Monaco to earn revenue from their users’ trades automatically. No negotiations, no backroom deals. TraderCodes do something similar for traders, rewarding only the most productive and active drivers of network growth.
The exchanges that won in traditional finance weren’t the ones with the best retail app. They were the ones with the best plumbing. ICE owns the NYSE and made $9.9bn in revenue last year. Many people have never used an ICE product directly. But every stock they’ve ever bought has touched one. Monaco is plumbing, and by turning competitors into distribution partners through revenue sharing, it can grow without needing to win every user directly.
It’s Finally Happening
The NYSE wants to trade tokenized stocks 24/7, and just tapped Securitize to make it real. The DTCC is tokenizing from a base of $87tn+ in assets under custody. Offshore perp DEXs crossed 3% of CME’s silver volume and found product-market fit. Nearly half the world’s iPhone users tap to pay without knowing what NFC stands for, and the future of trading probably looks more like that than like a six-step bridging process or writing down a 12-word passphrase to recover a private key. Every bank has a tokenization strategy and the infrastructure to trade tokenized assets still mostly doesn’t exist.
DeFi and TradFi aren’t two separate worlds anymore. They’re converging into one thing: finance. Global, 24/7, instant, and compliant. That is the architecture of wealth.