Markets Are Moving Towards 24/7 Trading, Says Abhinav Sharma

Financial markets are moving toward a more continuous, real-time model, shaped by advances in blockchain infrastructure, tokenized assets, and changing investor expectations. The idea of equity markets operating 24 7 used to sound theoretical. More institutions are now exploring it as they rethink how trading, settlement, and liquidity should work in a digital economy.

Abhinav Sharma sees the shift up close. He is a senior technology leader at a global investment bank focused on digital investing platforms. He believes tokenization could become a practical bridge to more continuous markets by compressing settlement cycles and expanding how investors access and trade assets.

“Markets do not change overnight,” Sharma says. “They change when the infrastructure makes a new behavior possible, then people start expecting it.”

He points to a few familiar constraints in today’s market structure. Trading hours are limited. Settlement still takes time. Liquidity can be fragmented across venues and products. Capital gets tied up in the gap between execution and final settlement, which affects efficiency for both institutions and individual investors.

The emerging toolkit aims to reduce those gaps. Blockchain based settlement and programmable assets are beginning to address limitations by enabling faster execution, continuous liquidity, and more transparent transaction flows. Sharma frames the shift as evolution rather than disruption. He expects traditional and digital market structures to coexist, at least for a period, as the industry tests new rails and regulators refine how safeguards should apply.

“Most changes in markets look incremental while they are happening,” Sharma says. “Then you look back and realize the baseline moved.”

His perspective is grounded in platform scale. At his bank, Sharma has been closely involved in building and scaling online retail investing platforms serving millions of investors and overseeing more than $130 billion in assets. He leads a global team of more than 150 technologists and manages over $20 million in technology modernization initiatives. He sees the changes not only in market headlines, but in behavior. Investors want the same immediacy they experience elsewhere in the digital economy. They want access when news breaks. They want visibility that stays current. They want fewer delays between decision and action.

“Investors are used to everything else being always available,” Sharma says. “That expectation does not stop at markets.”

Execution quality is one place where modernization becomes measurable. Sharma notes that on modern platforms, improvements in execution quality can show up as price improvement versus the National Best Bid and Offer on a very high percentage of orders. He points to that kind of performance as evidence that infrastructure upgrades can translate into better outcomes for investors, even before the market becomes fully continuous.

“Small edges matter when they repeat,” Sharma says. “They turn into real money at scale.”

He also emphasizes that always on markets do not only require longer trading hours. They require reliability, transparency, and systems that can withstand stress. He has led teams through periods of intense volatility when volumes rise quickly and stability becomes a non negotiable requirement.

“Volatility is when the platform gets audited,” Sharma says. “That is when you find out what your engineering actually supports.”

Tokenized assets and programmable settlement could push the same idea further by reducing settlement friction and enabling assets to move in a way that better matches digital expectations. Sharma argues that tokenization is not only an efficiency play. It can become a structural shift that changes how equities are issued, traded, and settled. He believes it could support more dynamic price discovery, broaden liquidity access, and connect investors globally, while still requiring careful alignment with regulatory frameworks and existing market safeguards.

“Speed is not the goal by itself,” Sharma says. “The goal is a market that is more responsive without becoming less safe.”

He also sees a behavioral side to continuous markets. Longer access can reduce the pressure to trade within narrow windows, but it can also create new demands for education, risk controls, and clearer design. Sharma believes platforms should help investors make decisions with more control, not push them into constant reaction.

“If the system increases confusion, it increases mistakes,” he says. “A good platform reduces mistakes.”

Sharma has written about these themes in broader industry discussions, including tokenized equity markets and the gradual move toward 24 7 trading environments. He places the focus on what has to be true for the shift to work. The technology must be resilient. The transaction flow must be transparent. The guardrails must be enforceable. Firms must be able to reconstruct what happened, quickly and precisely, if something goes wrong.

“You cannot run modern markets on assumptions,” Sharma says. “You need systems that explain themselves.”

He also sees the transition as a long convergence. Traditional market infrastructure has decades of safeguards and operating norms. Digital rails offer new possibilities, but they also introduce new questions about interoperability, supervision, and systemic risk. Sharma believes the most likely near term reality is a blended market where tokenized and non tokenized assets operate side by side, while infrastructure continues to modernize behind the scenes.

“Coexistence is a practical step,” Sharma says. “It gives the industry room to prove what works.”

For leaders building investing platforms, that creates a clear mandate. Build for a world where access keeps expanding. Build for settlement that keeps compressing. Build for investors who want immediacy, but still need guardrails. Sharma believes the future belongs to systems that can offer continuous availability without sacrificing stability.

“The obligation is straightforward,” Sharma says. “Build systems people can trust, even when the market never sleeps.”

For more information about Abhinav Sharma, visit his LinkedIn profile.