Crypto: 24/7 Global Stock Market Is Impossible On Today’s Blockchain
Current blockchain infrastructure has inadequate throughput and systematic front-running. Real-world finance demands sub-second finality and fair transaction ordering.
Opinion by: Joshua Sum, head of product at Solayer Labs
Consider a single, borderless financial market operating around the clock, where a farmer in Nebraska can instantly hedge wheat futures. At the same time, a pension fund in Tokyo trades Tesla shares seamlessly, all without permission, intermediaries or geographic constraints.
It’s the logical endpoint of blockchain technology and asset tokenization, a vision that has captivated everyone from JPMorgan executives to Silicon Valley dreamers.
Yet this remains a distant future. Not because we lack ideas, but because we’re trying to build it on a foundation — today’s blockchain infrastructure — that is fundamentally not ready for use on this scale.
The irony is almost painful. We’ve successfully solved the hard part: Real-world assets — stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate — are all being digitized at breakneck speed.
Nobody wants to admit that we’ve created digital stock certificates for a market that operates at the speed of a fax machine with the integrity of a back-alley dice game.
Current layer-1 blockchains suffer from three critical failures that make institutional-grade trading impossible.
First, the throughput ceiling. These networks simply cannot handle the volume that real markets demand. When a single popular asset launch can congest an entire blockchain for hours, how are we supposed to process millions of daily trades across thousands of tokenized assets? The numbers simply don’t add up.
Second, latency. Slow block times and uncertain finality make efficient price discovery nearly impossible. High-frequency trading? An uphill battle. Even basic arbitrage becomes a risky gamble when you can’t guarantee execution speed. The result is massive, persistent slippage that makes traditional exchanges look like Formula 1 cars by comparison.
Source: CoinTelegraph
