As real-world asset (RWA) tokenization increases, the crypto industry is entering uncharted territory, bringing traditional equities, private credit and commercial paper on-chain, uncovering potential critical risks along the way.
Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of oracle provider RedStone, says one risk is potentially being overlooked: the weekend gap, where crypto trades 24/7 while Wall Street doesn’t.
In traditional finance, if disaster strikes a company over the weekend, the market is closed and the stock “yawns down” when the opening bell rings on Monday. Meanwhile, trading never stops in the crypto market. As more stocks are brought on-chain, the gap in weekend trading on the blockchain for traditional stocks versus when the market opens on Monday could pose a risk, according to Kaźmierczak.
For example, a tokenized version of Tesla shares traded on a decentralized exchange allows traders to buy and sell them at 3:00 in the morning on a Sunday while the TradFi market remains closed.
“Imagine if a Tesla factory explodes over the weekend – traditional markets are closed, but on-chain markets are open,” Kaźmierczak said in an interview with CoinDesk at Devconnect Buenos Aires. “We may see a shift in the tokenized stock relative to the real value on the Nasdaq.”
This discrepancy, he argues, could create what he calls a “price shift” where an on-chain asset appears stable, but only because the oracles that send data from the outside world to a blockchain have stopped updating prices. Major providers typically freeze stock price feeds when US markets close at 4 PM ET Friday, and won’t resume until Monday morning. In that window, on-chain versions of Tesla or any other stock could continue to trade even if their real price should have changed dramatically.
Most tokenized equity trading activity is currently focused on centralized exchanges, where trading of these products is often restricted during the weekend. But the industry’s goal is to make these tokenized shares permissionless and available in DeFi protocols. This means 24/7 activity.
If the oracle does not update before markets reopen, on-chain protocols can trade at “ghost” prices, creating massive arbitrage opportunities or leaving lending protocols under collateral.
‘Inherent risk’
The problem is compounded by the complexity.
While stablecoins are relatively safe, Kaźmierczak pointed out that the market is shifting towards more complex products, such as tokenized portfolios of credit, commercial paper and stocks.
“Essentially, we’re seeing the launch of a hedge fund on the chain,” noted Kaźmierczak, describing future portfolios that could be “50% allocated to T-Bills, 20% to private credit, 20% to commercial paper and 10% actively managed.”
If oracles falter under real-world volatility, structured DeFi protocols could be left to misprice assets. RedStone advocates a modular oracle architecture and supports both “Push” and “Pull” models. In the “Pull” model, users have data delivered on-chain when they interact with a protocol, meaning “the data is always fresh,” according to Kaźmierczak. However, he admitted that most protocols still rely on the older model because it is easier to integrate.
“Right now it’s probably like 90% of the solutions are using Push Oracle,” he said, noting that while “Pull” was an innovation for scaling, the majority of the market is still adapting the old standard. Until oracles and protocols evolve to account for these timing discrepancies, Kaźmierczak suggested that the premise of 24/7 tokenized funding carries inherent risks.
As more RWAs go live, the challenge will be to manage the gap between open protocols and closed traditional markets.
“We still need to see how they behave at the weekend,” Kaźmierczak warned.
Read more: Nasdaq seeks nod from US SEC to tokenize stocks
