It's a growth play for financial services to find trading volume they otherwise cannot create. Young retail has no cashflow to speak of, so Coinbase and Robinhood target them for the house rake of trading meme stocks and crypto. The rest is institutional, broker dealer, traditional retail brokerages, etc but there's only so much revenue to be had moving existing securities around amongst those who can obtain exposure to them, managing pensions and 401ks, etc. ~93% of equities are held by the top ~10% of US households, for example.

Lots of cost inefficiency to squeeze out, but everyone is incentivized to not cannibalize other participants or their own business. "Its a big club and you're not in it" and "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you."

If I recall, the most optimal equities market operating model is a short auction window at the open and the close to process order books, but again, no appetite for efficiency over revenue, I'll have to find the paper.

(thoughts and opinions always my own)

Most ideal equities markets operating model would be a short auction period at the open and the close

This is almost exactly aligned with real life trading experience with retail traders. Retail trader P&L map by weekday and time of day shows that the overwhelming majority of retail losses fall into one of two categories - either choppy hours during the day where liquidity is low (noise from overtrading) or 15 minutes after the NY open where the volatility spike happens and stop hunts take place.

Extending equities to 24/7 with tokenization only increases the amount of low liquidity chop, which is good for exchange fees, but not for retail expectancy.