According to Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder and chief operating officer of blockchain oracle provider RedStone, tokenized stocks face a significant pricing challenge due to the 135.5-hour weekly blind spot when NYSE and Nasdaq are closed. As reported by crypto.news, automated market makers (AMMs) that set prices from their own pools can only maintain pricing integrity while the main U.S. equity market is open. During overnight hours, weekends, and holidays when NYSE and Nasdaq are closed, AMMs react to orders placed inside much smaller liquidity pools, with large trades potentially moving quoted prices even when investors cannot immediately buy or sell the underlying share. The arithmetic reveals that while U.S. equity exchanges trade for 32.5 hours weekly (9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday through Friday), the remaining 135.5 hours leave automated markets without a live, regulated reference price for onchain stock tokens.
The SEC's temporary exemption permits qualifying venues to bring buyers and sellers together through permissioned automated market maker pools for tokenized National Market System stocks. According to the SEC order, each token must provide the same rights and privileges as an equivalent class of conventional stock, with the exemption requiring issuer notice, equivalent shareholder rights, and coordinated trading halts. The relief covers tokenized NMS stocks but excludes synthetic products such as Robinhood's Stock Tokens and Kraken's xStocks, creating two separate classes of tokenized products tied to the same underlying shares. The regulatory backdrop to Kaźmierczak's warning is the SEC's 2026 decision to permit onchain trading of fully backed U.S. stock tokens on permissioned venues, representing a significant shift in how U.S. equities can be tokenized and traded.
As reported by crypto.news, the regulatory framework creates a complex market structure where investors may encounter conventional U.S. shares, fully backed ownership tokens covered by the SEC framework, and synthetic or wrapped products associated with the same company. Coinbase's stock-token products, for example, represent beneficial interests in shares held through offshore special-purpose companies and regulated U.S. brokers, with redemption dependent on identity, location, sanctions, and anti-money laundering checks. The five-year relief requires issuer notice and objection rights, though synthetic products outside the exemption do not follow the same governance process. The competitive landscape for off-hours equity pricing is still forming, with Chainlink and Pyth, the two largest oracle networks by market share, both having the technical capability to deliver off-hours equity prices but facing the question of what data source to use.
According to Kaźmierczak's analysis, the pricing gap problem compounds as trading volume increases, with higher order sizes creating greater price impact per AMM transaction while the hours without live primary-market reference remain unchanged. The COO's warning identifies the gap as a structural issue that the industry must address before tokenized equity markets scale, with the implication that oracle providers, exchanges, and regulators need to agree on what constitutes a valid off-hours reference price. Potential mechanisms being discussed include time-weighted average prices (TWAP), oracle fallback to secondary venues, and circuit breakers that pause trading when price divergence exceeds a threshold. The downstream impact falls most heavily on automated markets, with decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and derivatives platforms that list tokenized U.S. stocks relying on continuous price feeds to manage positions and trigger liquidations. The first mover to solve the off-hours pricing problem could become the default oracle for the entire tokenized stock market.
