Karla Barker 
The Weekend Trading Problem
As more traditional stocks move onto blockchain networks, we’re seeing an interesting problem emerge. Traditional markets close on weekends, but crypto never sleeps. This creates what some are calling a “weekend gap” where tokenized versions of stocks keep trading while their real-world counterparts are frozen.
Marcin Kaźmierczak from RedStone explained it pretty clearly. Imagine if something major happens to a company over the weekend—maybe a factory fire or some other disaster. In traditional finance, everyone waits until Monday morning to react. But with tokenized stocks trading on decentralized exchanges, people could be buying and selling at prices that don’t reflect reality.
How Oracles Create Ghost Prices
The issue comes down to how oracles work. These are the services that feed real-world data to blockchains. Most major oracle providers stop updating equity prices when US markets close on Friday afternoon. They don’t start again until Monday morning.
So you could have a situation where Tesla’s tokenized stock is trading at, say, $200 on a Sunday night, but if something catastrophic happened over the weekend, the real stock might open at $150 on Monday. That’s a huge price dislocation waiting to happen.
I think this creates two main problems. First, there are massive arbitrage opportunities for traders who understand this gap. Second, and more concerning, lending protocols could end up seriously under-collateralized if they’re using outdated prices.
The Shift to Complex Products
Right now, most tokenized stock trading happens on centralized exchanges, which often limit weekend activity. But the whole point of bringing these assets on-chain is to make them available in DeFi protocols that operate 24/7.
The problem gets worse as we move beyond simple stocks. Kaźmierczak mentioned that the market is shifting toward more complex products—tokenized portfolios that might include private credit, commercial paper, and various equities. It’s essentially like running a hedge fund on-chain.
If oracles can’t keep up during periods of real-world volatility, these structured protocols could be completely mispricing their assets. That’s a recipe for trouble.
Potential Solutions and Current Reality
RedStone advocates for what they call a “Pull” model where data gets delivered on-chain only when users actually need it. This means the data is always fresh. But Kaźmierczak admitted that about 90% of current solutions still use the older “Push” model because it’s easier to integrate.
It’s one of those situations where the technology exists to solve the problem, but adoption hasn’t caught up yet. Most protocols are sticking with what they know, even if it creates these timing mismatches.
As more real-world assets come on-chain, managing this gap between always-open protocols and traditional market hours will become increasingly important. We’re still in early days, and Kaźmierczak’s warning about needing to see how these systems behave on weekends seems pretty reasonable.
The industry wants permissionless, 24/7 trading of tokenized assets, but that freedom comes with risks that need to be addressed. Until oracle systems evolve to handle these timing differences better, there will always be this inherent risk in tokenized finance.