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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

London Stock Exchange Announces LSE 24, a Near Continuous AI Native Trading Venue With a Blockchain Settlement Path

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jul 23
  • 5 min read
For a scaling UK company whose staff and early investors are sitting on vested shares, the historic answer to when can I actually sell has too often been simple: nowhere, until an IPO or an acquisition years down the line arrives, if it ever does. Monzo is the example founders point to most often, a business that took years from its early funding rounds before staff or early backers holding vested equity had any realistic route to cash out. This week's announcement from London Stock Exchange Group is not really about that problem. It is a public markets story. But it lands at a moment when the private company version of the same question, secondaries and PISCES, is finally starting to produce real answers, and the contrast between the two is worth sitting with.

For a scaling UK company whose staff and early investors are sitting on vested shares, the historic answer to when can I actually sell has too often been simple: nowhere, until an IPO or an acquisition years down the line arrives, if it ever does. Monzo is the example founders point to most often, a business that took years from its early funding rounds before staff or early backers holding vested equity had any realistic route to cash out.


This week's announcement from London Stock Exchange Group is not really about that problem. It is a public markets story. But it lands at a moment when the private company version of the same question, secondaries and PISCES, is finally starting to produce real answers, and the contrast between the two is worth sitting with.


What London Stock Exchange Group announced


London Stock Exchange Group confirmed on 21 July that it will launch LSE 24, a new trading venue built to run from 5pm to 7.50am on weekdays, with a 30 minute pause for end of day processing. It is a separate venue from the LSE Main Market, which keeps its existing 8am to 4.30pm hours, and it has been engineered from scratch rather than bolted onto existing infrastructure.


The headline feature is not the extended hours themselves, several US exchanges including Nasdaq and NYSE Arca are already doing that, it is that LSE 24 is purpose built for AI trading agents, with native machine to machine connectivity, a hybrid order book and quote based matching system, and a planned integration with LSEG's Digital Securities Depository, a blockchain native settlement infrastructure being built under the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox.


Client testing is targeted for the end of 2026, with Exchange Traded Products the first asset class from the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, and equities flagged as the next expansion once the venue is proven. If the timeline holds, London would be the only major incumbent exchange running a regulated near continuous venue with both AI native connectivity and a live path to on chain settlement, at a moment when LSEG is under real pressure to demonstrate it can compete on market structure, after a year in which 88 companies left the London market against just 18 new arrivals.


The problem LSE 24 does not solve


That is the public markets half of the story, and it is genuinely significant. But it is not the half that matters most to the readers of this publication. LSE 24 trades listed securities. It does nothing, directly, for the tens of thousands of UK employees and early backers holding vested shares in private companies that are not listed anywhere, and have no plans to be for years. That is a different, older and in some ways more stubborn problem: where does a scaling UK company go if its staff and investors are holding vested shares and there is no exit in sight? For a long time the honest answer was nowhere.


That answer has started to change, not through anything resembling LSE 24's continuous, AI native architecture, but through a much more deliberate, periodic mechanism, PISCES, the UK's Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System. Four PISCES operators are now live or approved, London Stock Exchange's own Private Securities Market, JP Jenkins, Vestd and Asset Match, and each can run scheduled trading windows, weekly or monthly auctions rather than a continuously open book, specifically so that private companies can let staff and early investors sell a portion of their holdings without forcing a full exit event or handing new outside investors a permanent seat at the table. Alongside PISCES, a broader secondaries market has matured enough that scaling UK companies now treat a staff liquidity event as a plannable milestone rather than a hopeful accident.


Two different bets on what liquidity should look like


The real comparison, then, is not between LSE 24 and PISCES as competing venues, they solve different problems for different kinds of company. It is between two different visions of what liquidity should look like. LSE 24's bet is that liquidity should be as close to continuous as regulation allows, matched at machine speed, available to whichever time zone needs it.


PISCES' bet is that liquidity for a private company should remain intentional and periodic, because a company that has not yet gone public still needs to control who can buy in, how often, and at what price, without the noise and information asymmetry that a fully open market would introduce at a stage when the business is not yet ready to be a public company in substance as well as in name.


The open question


The open question worth putting to the people building both sides of this market, is whether that gap narrows over time. Does the direction of travel visible in LSE 24, near continuous trading, machine native connectivity, a blockchain settlement layer as the default rather than the exception, eventually reach the PISCES windows themselves?


Tokenised representations of private shares, settled on the same kind of infrastructure LSEG is building for its listed venue, could in principle let a PISCES operator run trading windows more frequently, or narrow the gap between a sale being agreed and the seller actually having cash, without changing the underlying legal position that Companies House remains the register of record and the three year SEIS and EIS holding period is a tax condition, not a lock on the shares themselves. Nobody has built that bridge yet, and it is not obvious that PISCES operators want to, since the entire point of a periodic window is to protect a genuinely private company from behaving like a listed one before it is ready.


This is an open editorial question, not investment or tax advice, and HM Treasury and the FCA have not ruled on how far tokenisation and PISCES windows should converge.


Key Takeaways

  • London Stock Exchange Group confirmed on 21 July it will launch LSE 24, a near continuous trading venue for AI agents running 5pm to 7.50am weekdays, with a planned blockchain settlement path via LSEG's Digital Securities Depository.

  • LSE 24 is a public markets venue for listed Exchange Traded Products from H1 2027, expanding later to equities, and is separate from the private company liquidity problem facing UK founders and staff.

  • PISCES, the UK's periodic private share trading system, now has three live or approved operators, London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, JP Jenkins and Asset Match, offering scaling private companies a scheduled alternative to LSE 24's continuous model.

  • The open question is whether the technology direction visible in LSE 24, continuous matching and on chain settlement, eventually narrows the gap with PISCES windows, or whether periodic liquidity remains the right model for companies not yet ready to be public.

  • This is an open editorial question, not tax or investment advice, and no regulator has ruled on how far tokenisation and PISCES should converge.


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