Financial markets are going through their deepest change since they became electronic.¹ Electronic trading made them faster. Tokenisation changes what they are made of. Shares, bonds, funds and money now also exist as tokens that can settle in seconds, and exchanges, depositories and central banks have begun to adopt them.

Markets are growing more global and more continuous, trading around the clock, from anywhere, across hundreds of traditional and on-chain venues. Assets and the infrastructure through which they trade and settle are becoming programmable. Software is no longer only the way into a market: it is part of the market itself.

A global market is a thousand markets at once, each with its own rules, collateral and settlement, each quoting the same asset at its own price. Liquidity is scattered across them. The law of one price is not a law of nature: it holds only where someone enforces it, on every venue, at every hour, at machine speed.²

Fragmented, programmable markets create new inefficiencies and new needs: prices that disagree and liquidity in the wrong place. These gaps are costs for market participants, and opportunities for those who can close them. Closing them is what turns a thousand markets into one, and it takes systems that can observe and act across venues, bringing data, execution, capital and risk together. The efficiency and liquidity of tomorrow’s markets will increasingly depend on these systems.³