Bob Diamond: The settlement window is closing as 24/7 trading opens up |
Bob Diamond: The settlement window is closing as 24/7 trading opens up
Bob Diamond is former chief executive of Barclays, founding partner and CEO of Atlas Merchant Capital, and chairman of Hyperliquid Strategies Inc.
When I started my career at Morgan Stanley in the early 1980s, trades were executed over landlines and settled with handwritten tickets. Over the following four decades, the industry built a system that is remarkably good at what it does within the constraints of its architecture: business hours, centralised clearing, regulated intermediaries, and settlement cycles that have shortened from five days to one. These were sensible design choices for that era. But they are design choices, not laws of nature. And a new class of infrastructure is now exposing just how much friction those choices still impose.
Hyperliquid is a decentralised exchange that processes billions of dollars in daily trading volume across perpetual derivative and spot markets, allowing users to trade an expanding range of digital and real-world assets including stocks, crude oil, silver, and equity indices. It operates on a purpose-built blockchain whose execution engine and consensus mechanism are optimized for trading efficiency—trades settle in under a second, compared with the T 1 window still standard in equities, with no downtime and transaction costs that are a fraction of what traditional venues charge. Hyperliquid does this without any traditional centralised intermediaries, exchange operators, or clearinghouses and on a 24/7 basis without market closures.
For most of the past decade,........