The era of on-chain Pre-IPO has arrived. How are crypto companies positioning themselves?

In June this year, internet brokerage giant Robinhood launched a new service for European users, offering trading opportunities for "stock tokens" of top private unicorn companies like OpenAI and SpaceX. Robinhood even airdropped a small amount of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to eligible new users as a way to attract them.

However, this move was immediately opposed by OpenAI. The official OpenAI account posted on X to clarify that "these OpenAI tokens do not represent equity in OpenAI, and we have no partnership with Robinhood." Under this message, Elon Musk did not directly comment on Robinhood's tokens, but he retweeted and commented on OpenAI's statement, sarcastically saying, "Your own 'equity' is the fake one." This jab not only mocked OpenAI's capital operations after becoming a profit-driven organization but also highlighted the significant discomfort that private companies feel about losing "pricing power" over their shares.

Despite the skepticism, the attempts by traditional brokerages reflect a strong market interest in on-chain Pre-IPO asset trading. The reason is simple: the enormous benefits of the primary market have long been monopolized by a few institutions and high-net-worth individuals, with many star companies experiencing exponential growth in valuation at the time of their IPO (or acquisition). Take the design software company Figma as an example; after failing to complete its acquisition by Adobe due to antitrust issues, Figma went public independently in 2025, with an initial price of $33 per share, closing on its first day at $115.5, a staggering increase of 250%; this price corresponded to a market capitalization of nearly $68 billion, far exceeding the $20 billion valuation discussed during Adobe's acquisition negotiations. Similarly, the recently listed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish saw its stock surge by 290% after opening.
These cases indicate that investing in such companies before their IPO could yield returns of several times or even tens of times. However, traditionally, it has been relatively difficult and complex for ordinary investors to participate in such opportunities. The appeal of the on-chain Pre-IPO concept lies in allowing retail investors to share in the appreciation dividends of future public star companies.

The Scale and Barriers of the Private Equity Market

Over the past few decades, the global private equity market has been large and rapidly growing but highly closed off. According to research by Yann Robard, a partner at Dawson Management, in the article "Why Private Equity Wins: Reflections on a Quarter Century of Outstanding Performance," the value created by the private market over the past 25 years is about three times that of the public stock market during the same period. Many excellent companies delay or even bypass going public, raising billions of dollars through multiple rounds of private financing. For example, OpenAI received $6.6 billion from investors like Microsoft and SoftBank in October 2024, and in March 2025, it completed a massive $40 billion financing, becoming the largest private financing case in history. With ample private funding, many companies can remain private for a long time or avoid going public altogether. The result is that enormous growth dividends have already been generated before companies go public, but only institutional investors can participate in these gains, completely excluding ordinary people.

A comparison chart of value creation in the private market versus the public stock market over the past 25 years, source: Dawsonpartners

Traditionally, a few secondary trading platforms aimed at wealthy investors (such as Forge and EquityZen in the U.S.) have provided limited channels for Pre-IPO share transfers. However, these platforms generally adopt a peer-to-peer matching model, with high trading thresholds, usually only targeting accredited investors, often requiring a minimum investment of tens of thousands of dollars. This OTC model results in poor market liquidity, a lack of pricing discovery mechanisms, and low trading efficiency. Moreover, many unicorn companies have highly restrictive bylaws regarding share transfers, and employees or early shareholders often need company approval to sell their shares.

Under the existing regulatory framework, the secondary market for private equity is almost closed off to ordinary investors. However, this barrier has slowly begun to open some "gaps." For instance, in June of this year, the Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) launched Tape D, a real-time dataset of private companies that enhances price transparency and valuation visibility for private and pre-IPO companies, allowing users to access desired information via API. This also provides a more equitable environment for "oracles."

The Pre-IPO market has not appeared for the first time in the crypto space. In recent years, constrained by technological performance, compliance environments, and insufficient investor education, this model has struggled to scale. However, the situation is gradually maturing, with significant improvements in blockchain scalability and user experience, and increasingly complete infrastructure for custody, KYC/AML, etc. At the same time, AI and crypto companies are frequently approaching IPO milestones, providing new narratives and investment demands for early involvement in these high-growth targets. Compared to locking funds in highly volatile crypto assets, Pre-IPO tokenized products offer structured and predictable exit paths in addition to speculation, attracting more funds seeking diversified allocations.

More importantly, millennials and Gen Z are becoming the main force in investing; they tend to prefer direct investments, frequent trading, and actively seek high-potential private equity opportunities, such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. However, under traditional frameworks, they can hardly access these transactions. If the Pre-IPO market can leverage on-chain tokenization to divide unlisted equity into small units with low entry barriers and introduce transparent secondary liquidity mechanisms, it could provide these young investors with cost-controlled, self-managed investment access that aligns with their values, creating an unprecedented global retail incremental funding pool for private equity.

Compared to putting money into pensions, Gen Z and millennials prefer investing; more detailed data can be found in Jarsy's Medium report.

Through tokenization, the originally expensive and scarce unlisted equity can be split into small digital tokens and traded on-chain 24/7. Smart contracts can also automatically execute rights such as dividends and voting, enhancing transparency and efficiency. More importantly, if these tokens can be traded on DEX or compliant platforms, market makers and liquidity pools can provide continuous quotes, avoiding the liquidity issues of pure peer-to-peer trading. Theoretically, private equity tokenization can allow global retail investors to participate in the growth of top private companies with extremely low entry barriers and improve the pricing discovery mechanism, making pricing more market-oriented and transparent.

Of course, the grander the vision, the more constrained the reality. Traditional regulatory complexities, private companies' resistance, and the complexities of technical integration are all unresolved challenges on the current tokenization path. Nevertheless, over the past year, with shifts in policy direction, we have seen a wave of projects exploring on-chain Pre-IPO trading emerge. Some focus on derivatives and leveraged trading, while others concentrate on the tokenized transfer of real equity.

On-Chain Trading of Pre-IPO

This category of platforms focuses on trading experience, often not directly holding the actual equity of the target company but allowing users to bet on the valuation fluctuations of unlisted companies through derivatives or other mechanisms. The advantage of this approach is a low entry threshold and no complex equity delivery processes; however, the challenge lies in pricing basis and compliance risks.

Ventuals: "Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts" with 10x Leverage on Hyperliquid

Ventuals is a new project incubated by Paradigm, founded by Alvin Hsia, who is also a co-founder of the recently popular content platform Subs.fun and previously collaborated with Paradigm as an EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) to co-develop the end-to-end data platform Shadow.

Ventuals aims to allow users to trade perpetual contracts for unlisted companies on the Hyperliquid blockchain. This model is similar to contract trading commonly seen in the crypto market, but the underlying asset is replaced with a valuation index of popular startups. The core advantage of Ventuals is that it can provide a trading market without needing to hold the underlying stocks, making it more akin to prediction platforms like Polymarket, which allows it to bypass many traditional securities regulatory requirements (such as identity verification and accredited investor qualifications).

The platform creates custom perpetual contract markets using Hyperliquid's HIP-3 standard and employs an "optimistic oracle" mechanism to obtain valuation data: anyone can submit valuation data for a company and stake collateral; if no one challenges it, the price becomes effective; if there is a dispute, it is resolved through on-chain voting. This mechanism brings the previously hard-to-obtain consensus on private valuations on-chain, providing a basis for pricing.

Ventuals' pricing method is also interesting; it does not directly use the company's most recent financing share price but anchors the token price by dividing the company's valuation by 1 billion. For example, if OpenAI's latest valuation is $350 billion, the initial price of one vOAI token is set at $350. This design lowers the trading threshold and makes the price numbers appear intuitive. However, the problem is that private company valuations are inherently opaque and updated infrequently, mainly relying on occasional financing or secondary trading information. While Ventuals introduces technologies like oracle + EMA (exponential moving average) to smooth prices, information asymmetry remains a hard issue: when the underlying data lags or even distorts, derivative trading based on it may amplify market volatility. Platforms like Polymarket that utilize oracles have encountered issues due to their flaws, and when the volume is larger, the rapid trading process may lead Ventuals into greater trouble.

Thanks to the founding team that bought Ferraris with investors' money, the market valuation has plummeted, source: Ventuals

As a trading platform, Ventuals' biggest selling point is providing opportunities to go long or short with up to 10x leverage, allowing users to "bet small to win big." However, the platform is still in the testing phase (only operating on the testnet). Ventuals is pursuing a fully decentralized derivatives route, attempting to create a global Pre-IPO exchange without trusting intermediaries through high-performance on-chain matching (Hyperliquid's ability to handle 100,000 orders per second). Of course, the compliance challenges it faces are still enormous; even though it does not hold actual stocks, these contracts essentially bet on securities prices and may still be viewed as securities derivatives by regulators. Furthermore, who provides liquidity and guarantees the accuracy of the oracle remains unknown.

Earlybird: A Long/Short Market for Pre-IPO on Solana

Earlybird is built by the team behind the NFT marketplace Hyperspace on Solana (which ceased operations in 2024, with Twitter even directly renamed from Hyperspace to Earlybird), also focusing on allowing users to "go long or short on companies before IPO," positioning itself as a next-generation private equity trading platform for retail investors. The team has received investments from top crypto VCs (such as Dragonfly and Pantera) and has accumulated experience in the Solana NFT space, now shifting to the Pre-IPO track.

It seems that the prices given by the oracles of the two platforms are a bit different; it remains to be seen whether this will be fixed after launch, and in the future, there may be opportunities for multi-platform arbitrage with Polymarket.

The founding team of Earlybird includes Hyperspace co-founders Kamil Mafoud and Santhosh Narayan. It is said that after Hyperspace shut down its NFT business in 2024, this team began focusing on the development of Earlybird. In fact, for them, a "Pre-IPO platform" may be more familiar than an "NFT platform," as both have experience working at Morgan Stanley and have been investment analysts for many years; their Wall Street connections may be more important in this field than those in cryptocurrency.

The specific product form of Earlybird has not been fully disclosed (the platform is still in a closed testing phase with an application system), but users can access the product through the Dev testnet (which offers a $10,000 trial experience lol). From its promotion, it is likely to be similar to Ventuals, using on-chain derivatives or synthetic assets to allow users to bet on the valuation fluctuations of unlisted companies. The fast and low-cost on-chain environment of Solana is also suitable for building real-time trading markets. The team may adopt an order book or AMM market-making mechanism to provide more continuous liquidity than traditional OTC. It is worth mentioning that there have already been practices of trading similar Pre-IPO assets on Solana, such as PreStocks, and earlier on-chain U.S. stocks (like the now-defunct mStock synthetic asset on Mango Markets).

The trading logic of Earlybird, source: @0xprotonkid

From a market positioning perspective, Earlybird may take a more open and decentralized route, with relatively lenient restrictions on user regions and qualifications. In short, Earlybird is an active explorer of the Pre-IPO track within the Solana ecosystem, and like Ventuals, it has chosen the approach of "not touching real equity and realizing the market through derivatives." Its success largely depends on whether it can solve the two core issues of valuation pricing and compliance risk control.

PreStock (backed by Republic): The "Good Kid" in Equity Token Trading Platforms

Compared to the "light asset" models of Ventuals and Earlybird, PreStocks is closer to traditional stock trading, just moved on-chain. PreStocks was founded by a team in Singapore and is backed by the established private equity platform Republic Capital, holding real private company shares through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and issuing 1:1 pegged tokens.

In simple terms, if PreStocks buys a batch of original shares of OpenAI through an SPV, it will mint "pOPENAI" tokens on Solana in a ratio of one token per share. Each token is backed by real stock, and investors holding tokens can enjoy almost the same economic rights as holding shares (capital gains from share price increases, future IPO realizations, etc.), but without direct legal shareholder status or receiving dividends.

PreStocks currently supports token trading for 22 private companies, including well-known unicorns like OpenAI and Canva. Users only need a Solana wallet, and they can buy and sell these tokens for as little as a few dollars, with no investment threshold restrictions. Tokens on PreStocks can be freely transferred on-chain, traded or lent on DEX platforms, and can even provide liquidity to earn trading fees or be used to build new structured products. PreStocks integrates the Jupiter aggregator and Meteora market-making to achieve 24/7 trading and instant settlement.

To ensure that each token has real stock backing, PreStocks has regulated custodians holding the underlying stocks and promises to disclose audit reports regularly. However, the team has not yet publicly disclosed detailed proof of holdings, only claiming that all tokens are 100% fully collateralized. Considering the involvement of unlisted company equity, PreStocks faces significant compliance pressure, so it has blocked users from major jurisdictions like the U.S. (on-chain buying and selling does not require KYC, but minting or redeeming PreStocks does). The company's registration in Singapore is also due to relatively lenient regulations.

PreStocks' founder Xavier Ekkel has stated that its vision is to make private equity investment as simple as trading public stocks. By providing retail investors with zero-threshold access to unicorns, PreStocks has indeed weakened the monopoly of traditional secondary markets to some extent. However, this model also has obvious limitations. First is liquidity: since the supply of each company's shares is limited (currently, the market capitalization of a single company's tokens on PreStocks is usually only a few hundred thousand dollars), the market depth is shallow, and large buy or sell orders can significantly impact prices. In contrast, established secondary institutions like Forge handle median transaction sizes exceeding $5 million, and PreStocks' trading system needs a broader user base to support its growth.

Secondly, its scalability is also limited by the "1:1 shareholding" requirement. Each new target requires extensive offline negotiations to purchase real stocks, which necessitates case-by-case communication with sellers (employees, VCs, funds, etc.), making the process lengthy and subject to the willingness of the target company. Furthermore, PreStocks itself is not a licensed securities exchange and operates more in a gray area; if regulatory attitudes change, the platform may be forced to restrict or withdraw related assets.

Overall, PreStocks has taken a more tangible path than derivatives, using real capital to "buy a path" for retail investors. Its advantage lies in providing more secure rights for investors (with real stock backing, they can receive actual payouts during future IPOs), but the downside is high operational costs and significant compliance challenges. I believe Republic is more interested in developing PreStocks into a "high liquidity trading platform" for distributing its mirror tokens, as it operates under Reg CF rules, limiting investments to $5,000 and requiring a one-year lock-up. At the same time, liquidity and "lock-up" restrictions on its acquired compliant centralized trading platform INX contradict the product's original intent, hence the choice of PreStocks as a "detour."

Platforms Focused on Real Equity Tokenization

This category of platforms directly offers end investors opportunities to purchase equity in unlisted companies, essentially a form of on-chain securities issuance or private crowdfunding. They typically require holding or locking real stocks, using tokens as proof for investors to share in future profits. This model is closer to traditional finance but leverages blockchain for registration and circulation, often operated by traditional financial companies or fintech firms.

Jarsy: A Group Buying Website for Equity Tokens

Among the many Pre-IPO projects, Jarsy has taken a steady and solid approach. It quietly launched on the Arbitrum network in 2024, with the company Jarsy, Inc. headquartered in San Francisco, founded by Hanqin, Chunyang Shen, Yiying Hu, and others. The founding team includes former senior executives from Uber China and engineering leads from Afterpay, who have a deep understanding of internet product operations and regulations. They secured $5 million in investment from institutions like Breyer Capital, with notable investors including Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, Nathan McCauley, CEO of Anchorage, and Richard Liu, CEO of Huma Finance. Jarsy's mission is to "democratize private investment through blockchain," providing ordinary investors with access to purchase equity in unicorn companies through strict 1:1 physical asset backing.

Jarsy's operational model involves first publishing Pre-IPO equity products for target companies on the platform, allowing users to pre-subscribe (paying in USDC or USD). Once a certain subscription amount is reached, Jarsy negotiates with venture funds, early shareholders, or employees holding shares of the company to acquire a certain number of real shares using the raised funds. If the acquisition is successful, tokens are minted in equal amounts to the actual shares and distributed to investors; if negotiations fail or fundraising is insufficient, funds are returned. This process is similar to traditional private equity share transfers but leverages a "raise first, buy later" crowdfunding approach, with on-chain tokens serving as proof of rights.

Jarsy also places all held stock assets in a dedicated SPV (special purpose vehicle) for custody and provides a real-time on-chain reserve proof page for inquiries. Each Jarsy token purchased by investors (e.g., JSPACEX representing SpaceX shares) corresponds to one share of real stock. Although token holders are not legal shareholders of the company, they enjoy nearly equivalent economic rights, including future IPO realizations, acquisition compensation, and potential dividend income. This makes Jarsy different from the other projects mentioned above, resembling a "group buying website" for private equity.

However, Jarsy still significantly lowers the participation threshold, with a minimum investment of only $10. More importantly, apart from U.S. investors, users worldwide can participate without needing accredited investor certification. Jarsy has also optimized the Web2 user experience, supporting email registration and fiat payments, creating custodial wallets for users, and making the blockchain's complexity almost imperceptible when purchasing tokens. Jarsy emphasizes compliance and ease of use, attempting to build a bridge product of "Web2 interface + Web3 backend." Since its launch, Jarsy has already introduced tokenized equity for star companies like Anthropic, Stripe, and Perplexity AI, with many products selling out immediately upon release.

Of course, the Jarsy model still faces two major challenges. First is liquidity: since the supply of each token depends on the actual shares acquired, and private equity lacks public market pricing, when large holders sell a significant number of tokens, it can lead to price crashes or a lack of buyers. Currently, Jarsy's largest holdings include X.ai (approximately $350,000), Circle ($490,000), and SpaceX ($670,000), all relatively small in scale. In such a shallow market, a sell order of several tens of thousands of dollars could potentially crash the price, indicating insufficient trading depth.

Secondly, any project involving "real holdings" will encounter expansion bottlenecks. Each new target requires significantly more effort than "derivative model platforms" and demands high networking and resource requirements. Additionally, although Jarsy claims to prioritize compliance, it still offers unregistered securities tokens, leaving uncertainty under the U.S. regulatory environment. However, Jarsy has proactively collaborated with top law firms like WSGR (Wilson Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati) to plan compliance pathways, indicating its intention to seek regulatory exemptions or approvals, which may make it more appealing to institutions in the current compliance environment.

As Jarsy's CEO Han Qin stated, "We founded Jarsy to bring long-standing private investment opportunities monopolized by institutions to ordinary people." Despite challenges such as liquidity and compliance, Jarsy has taken an important first step and is one of the currently more compliant "equity tokenization platforms." With user growth and asset scale expansion, if it can gradually gain regulatory recognition, its tokens may circulate in compliant secondary markets, making "Pre-IPO equity" a true asset class for the public.

Opening Bell: A Pioneer in Traditional Stock Chain Transformation

The Opening Bell platform launched by Superstate offers another path, allowing companies to move their stocks onto the chain directly. Unlike previous projects where third parties buy shares and issue tokens, here the company itself becomes the issuer. In May 2025, Superstate (a compliance fintech company founded by Compound founder Robert Leshner and others) announced the launch of Opening Bell, enabling publicly listed or eligible private companies to conduct 24/7 on-chain trading via the Solana blockchain. In simple terms, publicly listed companies or private companies can issue on-chain versions of stock tokens on the Opening Bell platform, ensuring that these tokens represent actual legal equity (not synthetic mirror tokens).

The first practitioners of this model include Nasdaq-listed company Upexi (stock code UPXI) and Canada's SOL Strategies, with Galaxy Digital, which recently made headlines for its Ethereum coin stock company, also participating (though only the SOL Strategies case has not yet been listed on Nasdaq). This requires a strict legal framework, such as Superstate already registering as a digital transfer agent in the U.S. to ensure that the on-chain shareholder register is synchronized with traditional registration.

The emergence of Opening Bell marks a further integration of traditional finance and blockchain. Through this platform, company stocks can be traded in real-time 24/7, providing unprecedented flexibility and transparency, making stocks "always on" like cryptocurrencies. Private companies also have the opportunity to leverage Opening Bell for early liquidity; some companies planning to go public or not in a hurry for an IPO can entirely reach global investors through issuing on-chain stocks for financing or shareholder realization. Superstate explicitly states that Opening Bell's target clients include both publicly listed companies and "late-stage private companies" seeking liquidity.

Of course, the advancement of this model still requires regulatory approval. Currently, the on-chain plans announced by companies like SOL Strategies have submitted SEC application documents, but they all note "pending regulatory approval." However, at least in terms of trends, regulatory agencies are showing a more open discussion attitude towards asset tokenization. The U.S. SEC held a special roundtable in 2025 to discuss securities tokenization, with traditional giants like Blackstone CEO and Robinhood CEO publicly expressing support. Superstate itself has had successful experiences in stablecoins (USTB) and on-chain government bond funds, and now expanding into the stock field is quite timely.

Regarding Pre-IPO, Opening Bell provides a potential path for a disguised IPO, allowing companies to achieve public trading of stocks during the private placement phase without going through the lengthy traditional IPO process. For instance, a unicorn company could first issue a portion of equity tokens for trading on Opening Bell and then formally IPO or directly merge when conditions are ripe. This is somewhat similar to the past OTC market, but with on-chain technology, transparency and efficiency are greatly enhanced.

From a certain perspective, if this model is recognized, future IPOs may no longer require Wall Street underwriters but could be completed on-chain. From this angle, Superstate resembles Nasdaq's "Binance Alpha."

Is the Era of Investment Democratization Here?

Making investment opportunities in unlisted companies more open and efficient is undoubtedly an exciting trend for ordinary investors. From the perspective of wealth opportunities, this helps narrow the gap between the general public and institutional investors. However, the on-chain Pre-IPO field still presents both opportunities and risks. "Regulatory compliance" and "the resistance of target companies" are the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over such projects.

Embracing regulation and cooperation should be the main direction for on-chain Pre-IPO trading. More and more traditional financial institutions and investors are actually showing interest in this field. For example, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are researching tokenized securities; well-known VCs may consider collaborating with these platforms to release some shares on-chain without affecting company control. This new paradigm of LP and GP cooperation, if successful, is expected to significantly accelerate the popularization of private equity tokenization. Undoubtedly, on-chain trading of Pre-IPO assets is a new blue ocean full of potential. The "Trojan horse" of freely trading unlisted equity could ultimately open the "gates" of the capital market's ultimate form, and perhaps we are just a few steps away from that gate.

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