What is Cascade? The first 24-hour autonomous brokerage company to disrupt Wall Street

Cascade is the first self-operated innovative brokerage firm that consolidates margin guarantees and 24/7 continuous cryptocurrency, stock, and private asset markets into a single platform. Users can connect directly to bank accounts, trade perpetual markets, borrow against investment portfolios, and perform cross-asset transfers within a single margin account. The platform offers around-the-clock trading for US stocks like Tesla and OpenAI, as well as private assets, with zero transaction fees launching in January next year.

Self-Operation Model: The Autonomous Driving Revolution in Finance

The core answer to what Cascade is lies in its “self-operation” feature. For decades, the financial system has relied on multiple human intermediaries: brokers, clearinghouses, market makers, and regulators. These strong market foundations are surprisingly fragile; human-driven processes can suffer delays, mistakes, or even complete failures. Cascade reimagines the operational model of finance to enable it to run autonomously.

The closest analogy is an autonomous vehicle. You can increase speed limits and signs to improve safety, but human error always exists. The real paradigm shift involves redesigning so that it no longer depends on human judgment at every step. Similarly, the financial sector is undergoing a comparable transformation—shifting from manual operations to systems that continuously manage risk, settlement, and liquidity through software.

AFP shares common traits: they are continuous, always online, and crucially, they settle based on pre-defined rules enforced by code rather than temporary human intervention. This autonomous, driverless financial infrastructure has proven its worth in real-world applications and will endure long-term.

Proven Superiority of AFP Model Through Two Financial Crises

To understand what Cascade is, one must revisit the historical background that led to this model. During the 2008 financial crisis, the housing bubble burst, Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a domino effect across the entire financial system. Markets froze, hedging failed, institutions faced bankruptcy. The system fell into a paradox: if you lose, you go bankrupt; if you win, you might not actually receive the money. Only when the US government took emergency measures to stabilize remaining institutions was systemic collapse avoided.

Post-crisis, a fork in the road appeared. Regulatory responses included tightening oversight and increasing capital requirements—formalizing “too big to fail” institutions, making the system more bloated. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s white paper proposed a radically different vision: a peer-to-peer network managed entirely by software. Over time, from 2016 to 2022, a series of experiments gave rise to decentralized finance (DeFi). After dozens of iterations, the core financial infrastructure ultimately built a new market structure based on autonomous financial platforms (AFP).

The Luna incident in 2022 was the crypto equivalent of a real estate crash. In just 48 hours, $40 billion in assets vanished. The crisis quickly spread to the collapse of Three Arrows Capital (3AC), severe damage to Genesis, bankruptcy of FTX, Silvergate liquidation, culminating in bank runs at SVB and Signature. The US government was again forced to take emergency measures.

But during this crisis, how did AFP fare? Protocols like Compound, Aave, and Uniswap withstood the test. Their transparent, real-time liquidation mechanisms ensured valuation based on market prices, with no hidden bankruptcies, no forced liquidations, and no taxpayer funds used for bailouts. This validated the superiority of building systemic security into the underlying mechanisms rather than relying on human intervention.

Core Functions and Advantages of the Cascade Platform

Cascade’s perpetual markets are not limited to cryptocurrencies; they also provide around-the-clock access for traders in the US and globally to major US stocks like Tesla and Apple, as well as private markets like OpenAI and SpaceX. This is key to understanding what Cascade is: it breaks the boundaries of traditional financial markets in terms of time and asset classes.

Traditional finance requires manual operations, while new finance adopts self-management. Although traditional systems still operate, increasing layers of human regulation restrict innovation and reinforce the dominance of a few “too big to fail” companies. AFP offers a new model, embedding system security into underlying mechanisms.

Early access to Cascade’s perpetual markets reward program is invitation-only and will launch in the coming weeks. Zero-fee trading begins in January, providing significant cost advantages for early users. As the first brokerage built on the AFP model, Cascade provides continuous 24/7 access for users to autonomous market infrastructure—something traditional brokerages cannot offer.

Three Breakthroughs of the Unified Margin Account

Cross-Asset Integration: Hold stocks, trade digital assets, borrow against portfolios, and gain synthetic investment exposure—all within one account.

24/7 Market Access: Information never sleeps. Markets stay active continuously, unaffected by traditional exchange opening hours.

Bank Direct Connection for Simplicity: Supported by Circle, directly connect bank accounts for straightforward, immediate inflow and outflow of funds.