Why 24/7 markets are inevitable.

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]It's time for Wall Street to prepare for blockchain everything. Trading is going 24/7 365 and capital markets are coming onchain. And it's not just going to be the humans doing it. It's going to be their AI agents. We've got a lot to talk about today on the Daily Wolf. Let's go.

[00:00:24]What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I'm your host Scott Melker, also known as the wolf of all streets and we're going to spend the next 15 minutes live here from sunny Miami Beach at Consensus. It's the last day of this conference. I've got my friend here, Yoni Asia, the CEO of E Toro, to break down all the things I talked about in the intro. So, first of all, you guys were first to get public in this huge ICO wave. Obviously, I would just love to hear the very brief story of how you finally made that happen because nobody was able to do it for a long time.

[00:00:56]>> Right. So, we were planning to go public. We actually switched the prospects public 2 days before Trump announced tariffs. Markets dropped 25%, the banks tell me there is no IPO. I'm like, "Oh my god." I got two weeks of silence actually came back to coding really familiarized myself with AI which transformed the company after after two weeks I called Goldman. I'm telling them I'm coming to New York and we're taking the company public. And then we were the first company to IPO uh post tariffs. We were the first tech company uh first fintech company to go public since 2021 uh and first crypto company uh to go public since 2021. So we like actually were the first ones to open the markets to then a lot of great fintech and crypto IPOs. And now that the markets are open, I think everybody's trying to digest what the world's going to look like when everything is tokenized and when capital markets come on chain. You just came from Milkin, right? very different than the consensus conference, but you told me that that's the conversation right now is capital markets coming on chain through tokenization, >> which is super interesting to see the same conversation happening at Milin where you have all of Wall Street in LA with suits and then you come here to consensus and it's the same conversation of tokenization. I think it's now inevitable because we're seeing uh capital markets copying crypto markets.

[00:02:25]You had there the you know chairman of the SEC, chairman of the CFTC talking about the future of finance is onchain and I think everything that has been built and battle tested in the last 10 years in crypto, smart contracts, DeFi, people understand now more and more the utility of that to real world assets uh and how transformative blockchain technology is to eventually running everything in finance. I mean, for an audience like Yahoo Finance that's not deep in the weeds obviously on DeFi and all of these things, what does this really mean to see this happening so quickly? You mentioned obviously Paul Atkins with Project Crypto, but now you have the DTCC which settles 4.5 quadrillion in volume a year saying that's all going to be on blockchain rail. So f first of all tokenizing assets means you're bringing the utility of crypto which is 247 global and transferable 24/7 with liquidity to more and more and more assets. Now uh there's a hundred trillion dollars I think in the DTC. So when they're starting to basically experiment and experience with onchain, it it means that digital assets will become the future of assets and they will settle immediately like crypto, right? So it it settles immediately.

[00:03:45]It's not T+1. Uh and it means also that all these assets become smart with smart contracts. So you can actually lend them and get yield on them. Uh you can swap them immediately to all other assets in that ecosystem or bridge them potentially. uh taking things like stocks that are getting tokenized right now and suddenly trade 24/7 uh to potentially swapping now a stock to Bitcoin or to Ethereum uh to then connecting this world of real real world assets like stocks like real estate like private markets um and connecting that also to perpetual futures uh and to prediction markets. So all of the basically products that have been built originally on DeFi are now one getting more and more assets and are also moving into Treadfi. So what we're seeing is really the convergence between crypto world and Treadfi uh and DeFi.

[00:04:44]>> I mean the next topic here you touched on is 247 trading, right? I I have friends obviously on Wall Street hedge fund guys. When I bring up the idea of the stock market never closing, they lose their minds. Like what, you know, these are guys I I make the joke every time. It's like, you like your weekend in the Hamptons and your evening playing pickle ball. How does that, you know, how does Wall Street adjust to what we've been doing for so long, which is watching markets 24/7, 365?

[00:05:10]>> I think it's inevitable. So, we launched recently uh uh stocks, US stocks 24/7 outside of the US, as well as oil, gold, silver. And what happens is because now these assets actually trade on DeFi right then you act they forward the prices. So the prices are there over the weekend and consumers and a lot of the consumers uh we've seen like 60% of the people who were trading gold, silver and oil in it Toro actually came originally to it Toro to trade crypto. Right? So their expectations are why why are the markets closing? Like people who come from crypto are like why is the market shutting down during the weekend? That's a that's like a bug, right? In Wall Street, people think it's a feature. So we saw also the move to 245 last year, right? So last year was like a surge in stocks moving 245. And when I spoke to a CEO of an exchange overseas who's still trading only 8 hours a day, he was like, "Oh my god, you it's going to kill us.

[00:06:09]We won't be able to sleep anymore." And the answer is technology, right? So technology should be able to monitor the markets and do whatever you want to do while you're on your weekend uh uh in the Hamptons.

[00:06:21]>> Yeah. I was wondering if they were just going to have to scale to bigger teams worldwide or if eventually it really is the technology that takes over. Maybe everybody's so self-important that they think they're needed, but maybe these people aren't going to be needed at all.

[00:06:34]>> I I think AI agents are coming. I think this is the year where AI agents are coming. If you don't have yet an AI agent doing stuff for you, do it because it's really, really mind-blowing. I've been talking to 40 a different AI agents on my phone for the past 3 months. I've been probably talking to AI agents more than I talk to people. Um, and and it's really mind-blowing to understand that an agent is an AI that leaves 247. It always operates. It could do missions for you while you slip. It can code. It can look at the markets. It could rebalance your agent portfolio on it Toro. Uh it could build software monitoring. It could download things from the internet and read them in in the morning, give you a brief. And I think that experience also for me at least means that I believe agents eventually will trade on it Toro more than people.

[00:07:26]>> That was the next topic was aentic trading. So I I want to go there. I mean I could be an AI agent. You wouldn't even know it at this point. And but I mean no no you're still really >> but but but I think that these are the things that people aren't processing right what we can talk about 24/7 that's challenging enough but what about when you don't need to be there at all because it's my agent is transacting with your agent or my agent's trading against your agent or my agent is managing my portfolio actively and tax off harvesting and all these >> I think it's inevitable because if you look at the first couple of days of me working with my agent it's all it's all about training them to be a quant trader. So its original name was quant.

[00:08:06]I was like, "HiQant." Uh uh and and and then I had another one called money. Uh and because that's my interest, right?

[00:08:14]So So it replicated my interests. And then there was one called CMO Claw, which is marketing, right? So I built agents basically who replicate the things that I do dayto-day with my teams in it Toro. And the most important thing I found out is one is you really need to learn how to work with these AI agents because my AI agent in three days was a PhD level in physics, quantitative trading, finance, engineering cuz I was like just teaching him skills, skills, skills. But then when other people started talking to my agent, it's still like a three-year-old. So it's a it's a PhD level genius but it forgets after 12 hours what you talked to him 12 hours ago. So we started building memory layers for agents. How can how how can they learn but then remember right and the last 3 months was just every week also something else is happening in AI.

[00:09:10]So it improves constantly. So now it's not a three-year-old now I think it's like a 15y old. um uh but they can trade the markets, they can analyze the markets, they can uh operate 24/7 and make smart decisions. Risk management is key to managing investments. It's key to trading the markets. You have to monitor the markets 24/7. But now you have a PhD level looking at the markets, managing it.

[00:09:37]>> But you're a publicly traded company and you're playing with this stuff yourself.

[00:09:40]So you know that on any given day you can be a three-year-old, right? So how do you know at what point the technology has caught up to the point where you can as a publicly traded company who's registered being watched by the SEC unleash these things into the wild for your customers?

[00:09:54]>> So so first of all we already unleashed a lot of it. So we launched agent portfolio, right? Which uh the the unique part was you can take you have $10,000 in your account, but you can connect an AI agent to like $500, right?

[00:10:07]So that minimizes significantly the risk of experimentation and you can bring your own agent whether it's open claw or claude or cursor to trade on it Toro with your AI on it on on the Toro agent portfolio. Then Tori, we just recently signed an agreement with uh uh with Grock with now Space X AI. Um and we upgraded significantly our AI agent that now basically is a frontier model Grock 4.2 and 4.3 that's looking at the market, searching the markets, looking at X, then knowing who you are has a memory, right? So we've learned from working with agents. So everything we do at it Toro, we then translate to the Toro product. And that AI agent also has guard rails. So it doesn't have all of the superpowers that some of our uh agents have. Right.

[00:10:59]>> Right. So it's more limited and more guard railed and then gradually we're taking what we're learning. Then we're sort of uh institutionalizing it and bringing it to it Toro customers.

[00:11:12]>> Fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. I think people just don't realize we're not going to be doing very much very soon. I mean, the next topic I want to talk about sort of a as we move towards wrapping clarity act, right? I mean, that's been the other big topic here. We have tokenization, everybody's talking about that, stable coins, AI, but we still have different takes on what's likely to happen. As I said, you got public without any of it. Pregenious act, pre-clarity, you know, you were working on it in a contentious SEC. What are the odds and how important is it that this actually gets done in your mind? Can we live without it?

[00:11:47]>> I think the first of all, both Treadfi and DeFi can live without it because they have until now, right? And and we're seeing an extremely positive US administration towards crypto and innovation which already is unleashing a lot of technologies out there. What the Clarity Act will do eventually is that bridge, right? So right now there is no regulatory legal bridge that's clear enough between the tread technology and ecosystem which is where the vast majority of money in the world is to the world of decentralized finance and and blockchain technologies uh to serve customers. So that's what the clarity act is supposed to do. I know everybody's hoping for it to uh be by 4th of July. Yeah, I heard s such rumors. I I I think a lot of people are hopeful. I've been, you know, operating it Toro almost 20 years, seeing regulatory change in many many markets.

[00:12:47]We're regulated AC, you know, in the US, but also in the UK, the UAE, Europe, Singapore, Australia. So, we're regulated across the globe. I think eventually uh good regulation that helps the market converge is important but even if it takes a bit longer that's fine because both tread file will continue to evolve into new technologies defy will continue in its own path and clarity act uh here in the US is what is supposed to actually be able to bridge that and bring capital markets on chain.

[00:13:21]>> Yeah. What what I find interesting is that everybody is pinning their hopes on the Clarity Act getting passed, but we're still having all these conversations about everything that's happening with or without it.

[00:13:30]>> Yeah, it's you know, it's here to stay.

[00:13:32]These markets will continue to evolve uh and at some point these markets need a bridge between them.

[00:13:39]>> So, you think it can still get done even if it does not get done by July 4th?

[00:13:45]>> Again, that's what I'm hearing.

[00:13:47]um and uh and hoping uh and I see a lot of people here that are very much uh um more familiar with the matter than I am and they're saying eventually it gets done. Uh we've only got about a minute left but I want to ask you if everything goes perfectly what's the vision in 30 seconds for e Toro you know five years from now >> so you know I think the last uh 3 to 6 months we've seen scale in the usage of AI by I think more than 1500% growth in AI usage in it Toro so and I think it's just becoming more and more powerful and what does that mean that means we can build faster more products to our customer we launch an app store uh We now have I think about 50 apps on the app store and these beautiful apps both that our product managers are building as well as uh uh our pro investors are building and they're just building so many features uh that you know the the vision of the financial super app for you a platform where you know it could become your family office with AI.

[00:14:52]>> I love it. I hate to interrupt but we hit time. Thank you. See you guys tomorrow at the Daily Wolf.