AI and Blockchain Are Converging: SEC Rules, 23-Hour Markets, and Jordi Visser's Case for Bitcoin and Ethereum

September 24, 2026

The SEC clears tokenized, round-the-clock stock trading, Nasdaq moves to 23-hour days in December, BlackRock calls it the next internet moment, and macro veteran Jordi Visser makes the case that AI agents need Bitcoin and Ethereum to transact.

Finance

• The SEC opens the door to round-the-clock, tokenized stock trading. On September 17, 2026, the SEC issued an "Innovation Exemption," two five-year conditional exemptions that let "Tokenized NMS Stock" trade through automated market makers and liquidity pools instead of only through traditional exchanges. Every tokenized share must still be backed one for one by a real share and carry full shareholder rights, including voting and dividends, but the exemption enables self-custody, near-instant settlement, fractional ownership, and trading around the clock. It follows two other 2026 rule changes: Regulation Crypto Assets, proposed August 21, which creates a five million dollar startup exemption and a seventy five million dollar annual exemption for crypto asset offerings plus a safe harbor from being classified as securities, and a September 1 proposal letting transfer agents use blockchain to track who owns what.
• Nasdaq and NYSE Arca are taking equities to 23-hour trading. Starting December 6, 2026, both exchanges add an overnight session, so US equities will trade roughly from 9pm Sunday through 8pm Friday Eastern time, with a one hour nightly pause for processing. Nasdaq has framed the move explicitly as matching crypto's always-on style and global investor demand, with nearly seventeen trillion dollars of US equities now held by non-US investors who currently have to work around US market hours.
• BlackRock says the tokenization era has begun. In his 2026 annual letter, CEO Larry Fink declared that tokenization of all assets is underway, comparing it to the early internet opening up access to information. BlackRock says it already has close to one hundred fifty billion dollars in assets connected to digital markets, and Fink is pushing regulators for clearer rules on buyer protection, counterparty risk, and digital identity checks to go with it.
• Which crypto benefits. The SEC's Innovation Exemption specifically validates Ethereum, Solana, and the Uniswap protocol as infrastructure this trading is allowed to run on. Solana has spent two years building what one analysis calls the largest portfolio of tokenized equities on any blockchain. As of early September, tokenized stocks had reached a record 3.1 billion dollars in on-chain value, split roughly 33 percent on BNB Chain, 25 percent on Ethereum, and 23 percent on Solana, though most of that existing volume predates the new rules and will need to be rebuilt to comply with them.

AI

• Jordi Visser's case for AI and crypto converging. Visser is a 30-plus year markets veteran, President and Chief Investment Officer of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, where he manages the Weiss Alternative Multi-Strategy Fund. He spent nine years at Morgan Stanley trading global equity derivatives and opening its Sao Paulo office, then founded the macro fund Anchor Point Asset Management before joining Weiss, where he became CIO in 2009. His current thesis is that autonomous AI agents will increasingly need to transact with each other directly, and that requires payment rails the existing financial system was not built for. He points to stablecoins and blockchains like Ethereum and Solana as the infrastructure already filling that gap, and argues AI agent transaction volume on crypto rails could grow parabolically once agent to agent commerce becomes normal.
• Bitcoin as "the S&P 500 of the future." Visser's specific call is that as AI accelerates the pace of the economy, Bitcoin's fixed supply becomes more valuable as a store of value, potentially making it, in his words, the S&P 500 of ten years from now. He has separately argued the 2030s will be a graveyard for the Fortune 500 as AI-native startups outrun legacy companies, with Ethereum specifically as what he calls the real trade inside that shift.