As real-world asset (RWA) tokenization increases, the crypto industry is entering uncharted territory, bringing traditional equities, private credit, and commercial paper into the chain and uncovering potentially critical risks along the way.
Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of Oracle provider RedStone, says one risk is potentially being overlooked: the weekend gap, where cryptocurrencies trade 24/7 while Wall Street does not.
In traditional finance, if a disaster hits a company over the weekend, the market closes and then the stock “falls” when the opening bell rings on Monday. Meanwhile, in the cryptocurrency market, trading never stops. As more stocks come on-chain, the gap between weekend trading on the blockchain for traditional stocks compared to the market open 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 a.m. 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 could see a dislocation of tokenized stocks versus actual value on Nasdaq.”
He argues that this mismatch could create what he calls a “price dislocation.”“,” where an on-chain asset appears stable, but only because oracles, which send data from the outside world to a blockchain, have stopped updating prices. Major providers typically freeze stock prices when US markets close at 4 pm ET on Friday, only to resume on Monday morning. In that window, on-chain versions of Tesla, or any other stock, could continue to trade, even if its real-world price should have changed dramatically.
Most tokenized stock trading activity is currently focused on centralized exchanges, where trading of these products is typically limited over the weekend. But the industry’s goal is to make these tokenized stocks permissionless and available on DeFi protocols. That means 24/7 activity.
If the oracle is not updated until markets reopen, on-chain protocols could trade at “phantom” prices, creating massive arbitrage opportunities or leaving lending protocols without sufficient collateral.
‘Inherent risk’
The problem intensifies with complexity.
While stablecoins are relatively safe, Kaźmierczak noted that the market is moving toward more complex products, such as tokenized wallets of credit, commercial paper and stocks.
“We are basically seeing the launch of an on-chain hedge fund,” Kaźmierczak said, describing future portfolios that could be “allocated 50% to Treasury bills, 20% to private credit, 20% to commercial paper and 10% to active management.”
If oracles lag during real-world volatility, structured DeFi protocols could become mispriced assets. RedStone advocates a modular Oracle architecture and supports both “Push” and “Pull” models. In the “Pull” model, users receive data delivered on-chain when they interact with a protocol, meaning that “the data is always up to date,” according to Kaźmierczak. However, he admitted that most protocols still rely on the old model because it is easier to integrate.
“Right now, probably 90% of solutions use Push Oracle,” he said, noting that while “Pull” was an innovation for scale, the majority of the market is still adapting the legacy standard. Until oracles and protocols evolve to account for these temporal mismatches, Kaźmierczak suggested that the premise of 24/7 tokenized finance carries inherent risks.
As more RWAs become active, the challenge will be managing the gap between open protocols and traditional closed markets.
“We still have to see how they behave over the weekend,” warned Kaźmierczak.
Read more: Nasdaq seeks US SEC go-ahead to tokenize stocks
