Bob Diamond: The settlement window is closing as 24/7 trading opens up

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, digital assets have been discussed in two narrow frames: speculation and store of value. Bitcoin was digital gold; everything else was a casino. That framing was always incomplete, but it was understandable given the immaturity of the technology and the absence of real economic activity on-chain.

What is emerging now looks different. In late February, when the United States and Israel struck Iran on a Friday evening NY time, traditional commodity derivatives markets were closed. Trading in perpetual derivatives in crude oil on Hyperliquid surged within hours as participants priced in the shock in real time. By the weekend, trading in oil perpetuals on the platform recorded over $1.2 billion in 24-hour notional volume. As major Western commodity derivatives markets reopened on Monday, they confirmed the direction Hyperliquid had already been pricing in for two days. Silver followed a similar pattern in January during a period of acute physical market stress. In March, S&P 500 perpetuals began trading on the platform with the full endorsement from S&P Dow Jones Indices, offering round-the-clock, on-chain exposure to the world’s most widely tracked equity index.

These are not toy markets. This is genuine price discovery happening on decentralised infrastructure 24/7 and it is happening precisely because the infrastructure is available when and where legacy venues are not.

The economics merit attention too. Hyperliquid generated approximately $962m in fees in 2025 on roughly $3tn in notional trading volume. The majority of these fees flow into an automated, non-discretionary mechanism that purchases HYPE, the network’s native token, on the open market, reducing the circulating supply of the token. HYPE secures the network through staking, provides trading fee discounts, and conveys governance rights—all of which promote use and adoption of Hyperliquid. Unlike purely speculative tokens, its economics are a product of the protocol’s design: trading activity generates fees, fees reduce supply, and growing adoption reinforces the network’s security and liquidity.

This matters because of what it signals about market structure. When we invested in Circle in 2021, our thesis was about infrastructure, not cryptocurrency. Circle was building a digital version of the dollar for institutions that could move at the speed of the internet, settle around the clock, and eliminate layers of intermediaries. The same logic applies here, at the trading layer rather than the payments layer. Blockchain technology is not replacing the financial system. It is rewiring it.

None of this is to suggest the regulatory questions are settled or straightforward. Hyperliquid sits outside the existing U.S. market structure framework, and as a permissionless, non-custodial exchange it raises genuine questions across several regulatory perimeters: what is the jurisdictional line between SEC and CFTC oversight? What does anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance look like in an architecture without a single identifiable operator? How to best address the cross-border problem of whose rules apply when validators, liquidity providers, and end users are globally distributed? And, when there is no central counterparty in the traditional sense, where does enforcement fall? Should it be on front-ends, on market makers, on validators, or on the protocol itself? How these questions are answered will shape Hyperliquid’s trajectory and the development, access to and adoption of next generation market infrastructure in the United States. Recent announcements and enforcement patterns suggest US regulators are aware of the challenges and are working hard on constructive answers.

For too long, the conversation about digital assets has been trapped between price speculation and regulatory anxiety. Both miss the point. What is being built on platforms like Hyperliquid is not a speculative playground. It is the next generation of market infrastructure, which is open, efficient, and available to anyone with an internet connection. The settlement window, in every sense, is closing.

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