Author: Jay Yu
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
For the world’s fastest-growing tech companies, the public markets are no longer what they once were. Thirty years ago, Amazon went public three years after its founding, with a valuation of $438 million. Netscape went public just eighteen months after its founding.
But today, the fastest-growing companies (Stripe, SpaceX, OpenAI, Ramp) typically remain private for over a decade. The high-growth exposure that investors once easily accessed through public markets has now been quietly preempted by private capital, with ever-rising valuations.
In a cynical sense, [venture capital] has hijacked the growth phase of early-stage public companies. Amazon went public when its market cap was under a billion dollars. Today, that’s almost unimaginable.” — Bill Gurley
The market has responded with some temporary patches: special purpose vehicles (SPVs), secondary market platforms, tender offers, and other tools designed to meet investors' appetite for growth-stage risk assets. But these are merely patches, not fundamental solutions.
What investors truly desire may be the very vision once embodied by tech companies going public thirty years ago: gaining broad, liquid exposure to transformative companies and sharing in venture-scale returns.
Tokenizing risky assets may be part of the solution. This article explores how tokenized startups can help rebalance these disconnected markets, centered around three key questions:
(1) Why now is the right time for tokenized startups to grow
(2) What is the landscape of tokenized startups?
(3) What are the key opportunities, challenges, and unresolved contradictions hindering the scaling of this field?
Part One: Why Are Tokenized Startups Right Now?
Tokenized startups are at the intersection of three major trends:
(1) SPV and other temporary tools have experienced explosive growth as de facto liquidity mechanisms for generation-defining tech companies.
(2) Tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are growing rapidly, covering areas such as money markets, public equities, and commodities.
(3) The consensus on "tokens versus equity" has broken down, with project tokens increasingly becoming second-class citizens compared to venture equity investments.
1.1 The Rise of SPV
Ten years ago, SPVs were a niche tool, a way to pool capital outside traditional venture capital or public financing structures. But over the past two years, they have become a key part of capital strategy, with platforms like AngelList, Carta, and Assure making it easier than ever to set up SPVs for specific opportunities and companies.
In particular, the secondary market SPV has grown by over 545% in the past two years, with capital raised increasing more than tenfold. These temporary market structures have captured significant market growth: the weighted basket of the top 50 secondary market assets on Hiive achieved a 49.1% gain in 2025, significantly outperforming the S&P 500 Index.
This indicates that investors are using temporary private market structures to restore functions that public markets once performed more smoothly: access, liquidity, and price discovery. As companies remain private for longer periods, SPVs have become one of the primary alternatives.
1.2 RWA, Tokenization, and the Perpetual Tokenization of Everything
The second trend is the tokenization of various asset classes and the rise of perpetual markets.
In the first quarter of 2026, the on-chain RWA value reached approximately $320 billion. While U.S. Treasuries (which can serve as collateral for stablecoins) remain the largest RWA asset class, significant growth has also been observed in asset categories such as commodities, equities, and asset-backed credit (e.g., Figure’s home equity loans).
As RWA gains adoption, we are seeing tokenized supply chains mature: encompassing all aspects from issuers and custodians to regulatory frameworks.
Meanwhile, perpetual futures have seen significant growth over the past two years, driven by the rise of perpetual decentralized exchanges (perp-DEXes) such as Hyperliquid. Unlike derivatives with expiration dates, perpetual futures have no expiry, offering practical advantages in execution, greater ease of understanding from a risk perspective, and native support for 24/7 trading.
Projects like TradeXYZ have extended perpetual futures beyond pure crypto pairs such as BTC-USDC to other asset classes, including U.S. and South Korean stocks, commodities, and stock indices, combining with HIP-3 to provide a standardized method for creating new perpetual markets.
1.3 The Breakdown of the Token-and-Equity Consensus
The third growing trend is the value capture dilemma between tokens and equity.
Tokens from decentralized finance projects such as UNI and AAVE explicitly stated at issuance that they do not represent equity, to address regulatory concerns. This has created a "token-equity consensus" whereby project tokens should function as synthetic instruments granting owners "governance rights" over certain aspects of the protocol and promising fee collection as a means of value capture.
However, this creates a two-tier system where value capture becomes a zero-sum game, and token holders become second-class citizens compared to equity holders.
This issue has become clear in recent events, such as the standoff between Aave DAO and Labs, and the controversial acquisition of Axelar by Circle, where token holders' interests were subordinated to equity holders' interests.
All of this has prompted a rethinking of the existing "token vs. equity consensus": How can we design tokens that better reflect a project's upside potential?
The convergence of these three trends may pave the way for the rise of "tokenized startups"—providing retail investors with tokenized exposure to companies with venture-scale growth potential, enabling the general public to access exceptional, era-defining companies early, as they once did in public markets.
Through this method, tokens restructure the traditional initial public offering mechanism, enabling a broader public to access the most popular major companies.
Part Two: The Landscape of Tokenized Startups
2.1 Current Design Methods and Trading Volume
Today, tokenized startups employ a variety of approaches and designs across two main dimensions: investment mechanisms and startup stages.
Investment mechanisms for tokenized startups range from SPV tools holding equity (such as PreStocks) and closed-end funds offering access to company equity (such as Robinhood Ventures), to pure perpetual futures that provide only price exposure without ownership of the underlying equity (such as TradeXYZ and Ventuals).
The startup phase ranges from early-stage companies (such as MetaDAO’s platform) to growth-stage assets, as well as well-known pre-IPO companies (such as SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI).
Reviewing the key players in this space and their sizes (based on 24-hour trading volume as of May 30), we observe several clear patterns.
First, the largest trend is that trading volume on late-stage (especially pre-IPO startup) platforms is more than ten times higher than at early stages. In particular, users appear to favor investing in well-known companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic, Anduril, and OpenAI, regardless of which platform offers these assets.
Secondly, trading volumes for equity-based tokenized startups (such as those through Robinhood Ventures and PreStocks) are typically higher than those on their corresponding perpetual contracts platforms. Part of this may simply be due to Robinhood’s distribution advantage as a platform, along with TradeXYZ’s conservative strategy of rolling out perpetual contracts one at a time.
Notably, TradeXYZ achieved significant success with its perpetual contract for Cerebras Systems, recording daily trading volumes exceeding $30 million and providing accurate price discovery within 3% of the issuance price.
Third, within this landscape, all platforms exhibit a strong power-law concentration effect, where trading volume is often dominated by fewer than three assets. For example, MetaDAO’s trading volume is dominated by META, Avici, and Umbra; Street’s trading volume is dominated by KLED.
As of May 30, 2026, TradeXYZ currently offers trading pairs only related to SpaceX, which accounts for approximately half of PreStock’s weekly trading volume. This significant power-law effect may indicate that traders are more loyal to high-profile, high-quality assets than to the underlying platform itself.
2.2 Project Design Architecture
We can also delve into individual elements within this framework to carefully examine the trade-offs among various design approaches in this space, from perpetual contract exposure to SPV-supported equity structures.
Note: The platform comparisons and feature descriptions in this analysis represent the author’s views based on publicly available information as of May 30, 2026. Descriptions of platform strengths and weaknesses do not constitute investment advice.
Part 3: Challenges and Opportunities for Tokenized Startups
Today, tokenized startups are still in their early stages, with their design space filled with numerous opportunities and challenges.
3.1 Consent to Equity Transfer and Alignment with Team Interests
One of the most pressing issues currently facing spot tokenization startup platforms is whether these projects align with or contradict the interests of the founding teams, particularly when platform trading volume is disproportionately concentrated in one to three high-quality assets.
This is especially true for highly anticipated upcoming public companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, which carry the majority of pre-market demand and trading volume.
Without the team's approval, the company might publicly announce opposition to tokenization, leading to canceled sales and a subsequent collapse in token value, as demonstrated by Anthropic's opposition to secondary market SPVs and OpenAI's opposition to Robinhood's stock tokens.
Typically, companies in the growth stage pursue an IPO for four clear reasons: (1) access to capital through public markets; (2) real-time pricing; (3) liquidity exit for founders and investors; (4) a prestige signal.
Today, the surge in growth-stage "mega funds" has created an exceptionally robust and well-funded environment for the hottest startups, often at very high valuations. This dynamic has diminished the incentive for growth-stage companies to pursue public offerings (1) and (2): they no longer need to turn to public markets for capital, and real-time pricing carries the risk of downward price adjustments.
Therefore, in today’s financing environment, a popular growth-stage startup will only enter the public market if there is strong demand for immediate liquidity from early employees and investors—such as during Facebook’s 2012 IPO—or as a symbol of maturity and prestige.
For a spot tokenized startup platform seeking board approval and offering direct ownership access in today’s funding environment, the latter two motivations carry significantly more weight.
Traditional secondary market brokers like Forge and Hiive cater more to liquidity motives, while high-profile closed-end funds like Robinhood Ventures and USVC can be said to cater to prestige motives.
Nevertheless, alongside traditional listing motivations, a range of new designs have emerged—such as tokenized startup baskets, tokenized accelerator models, and tokenized community issuances—that can address this founder alignment issue:
The tokenized startup basket refers to a tradable portfolio of growth-stage startups, rather than individual tokenized companies.
This is a pathway offered by closed-end funds such as Robinhood Ventures. This mechanism satisfies motivations related to liquidity, prestige, and even capital acquisition, while mitigating downward repricing pressure from “real-time pricing” by using net asset value (NAV) multiples (somewhat similar to DAT).
The Tokenization Accelerator model applies traditional accelerator and incubation models (such as YC, HF0, South Park Commons) to help startups achieve growth from 0 to 1 in exchange for their agreement to tokenize equity.
We see issuance platforms like Street and MetaDAO effectively providing this model; they address the alignment of founders' interests by standing alongside founders and genuinely helping them grow.
Tokenized community issuance may be the most interesting and promising model for tokenized startups. As demonstrated by the Uniswap airdrop in 2020, tokens can serve as an excellent incentive for everyday users to engage with a product daily.
When executed properly, token airdrops can lower customer acquisition cost (CAC), especially for consumer-facing projects, by subsidizing organic user engagement, enhancing project marketing, and improving user satisfaction.
For example, Revolut conducted a community equity round, raising $1.3 million from early users at a $40 million valuation. This served a dual marketing purpose, turning users into owners and advocates, with those early supporters achieving a 400x return.
However, token airdrops can also be a double-edged sword; many crypto projects' airdrops have been plagued by sybil attacks, insider allocation allegations, and immediate selling pressure.
3.2 Non-U.S. Jurisdictions
Another way to circumvent the founder alignment issue is to go global. Much of the current discussion around tokenized startups (and their trading volumes) adopts a U.S.-centric perspective, focusing on the most popular U.S. companies and assuming public listings on U.S. markets.
But the U.S. public and private capital markets have already served growth-stage companies exceptionally well, making it difficult to justify the additional benefits of tokenized offerings to companies.
However, this may not be the case in other regions, where local capital markets may be inefficient and unable to provide optimal liquidity or pricing for the fastest-growing companies. For example, Wise was initially listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021.
However, in May 2026, it will transfer its primary listing to the Nasdaq in the United States, as it believes this move will attract a more liquid market, reach a broader base of retail and institutional investors, and secure more favorable valuation multiples.
This geographic disparity in valuation and funding is also evident in the difference in valuation multiples between U.S. and Chinese AI companies.
Leading U.S. artificial intelligence companies typically have price-to-sales ratios of 15 to 40 times, while Chinese AI companies have much more conservative ratios, closer to 5 to 15 times. This discount may partly stem from capital access; China’s capital markets are generally harder to enter than those in the U.S.
As different parts of cutting-edge supply chains in artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, and biotechnology are dispersed across the globe, and related companies are listed in Asian and European markets, this geographical valuation arbitrage becomes particularly intriguing.
Although non-U.S. jurisdictions have this structural advantage in tokenized startups, current empirical trials and trading volumes remain limited. This may be due to the difficulty in finding high-demand startups willing to experiment with their cap tables, as well as the complex regulatory environment in local markets regarding foreign investment and tokenization.
South Korea is a particularly noteworthy non-U.S. market for tokenized startups.
South Korea has:
(1) Several nationally leading companies in the AI supply chain with strong global investor demand, such as Samsung and SK Hynix
(2) New legal framework for "stock tokens";
(3) Actively monitor brokerages offering pre-market investing;
(4) There are more cryptocurrency investors than stock investors.
This may be part of the reason TradeXYZ has actively started listing perpetual contracts on Korean stocks.
One of the biggest advantages of tokenization is its ability to enable geographic arbitrage, providing global audiences with direct access to invest in companies around the world.
Tokenized startup platforms, with their global liquidity infrastructure and potential to open up to a broader base of retail and institutional investors, are likely to become part of the upgraded listing strategy for fast-growing companies outside the U.S.—like Wise—that lack strong domestic capital markets.
3.3 Funding Rate Design for Perpetual Contracts
Another path for tokenized startup platforms is to employ perpetual contracts. If what is held are synthetic instruments that do not represent underlying equity, then the board has nothing to invalidate. This avoids the need for team intervention and board approval. However, while synthetic assets circumvent legal issues, they introduce challenges in price discovery.
Existing perpetual futures markets (such as perpetual contracts for crypto tokens, stocks, and commodities) typically rely on liquid spot markets and reliable price oracles to manage funding rates and synthetic pricing. However, by definition, private startups do not have liquid public markets.
The closest available markets are tender offers and secondary market purchases, platforms like Ventuals use them to anchor their funding rates. However, these are often unreliable and frequently undervalue the underlying asset's price.
For example, on Ventuals, the funding rate is approximately 15% annualized within a 5% range of the oracle price, and rises exponentially outside this range, imposing punitive fees on long positions.
TradeXYZ takes the opposite approach, relying on an oracle-free price discovery mechanism. For example, in Cerebras Systems’ offering, TradeXYZ established only a Hyperp mechanism that derives the reference price from recent market quotes, allowing the contract to self-discover its price within the narrow time window between the S-1 filing and the official listing. Its performance surpasses any other mechanism on the market.
The CBRS perpetual contract was launched on May 1 with a reference price of $175 and traded stably between $288 and $320 over the following two weeks, reaching around $340 one hour before opening, within 3% of the actual Nasdaq opening price of $350.
This estimated price is approximately 84% higher than the investment bank's pricing of $185 and is significantly more accurate than pricing from secondary market brokers such as Hiive ($225) and Forge ($113.50), demonstrating the tremendous success of perpetual contracts as a tool.
However, this process may not be scalable, as clear price discovery depends on an imminent, verifiable convergence event. If Cerebras does not list within a specified time period, the contract will settle at its time-weighted average price.
In this sense, the "perpetual contract price discovery" mechanism ultimately resembles traditional futures contracts and may not be suitable for early-stage assets that are not planning an initial public offering anytime soon.
Therefore, the design space for tokenized startups based on perpetual contracts remains very broad. Scalable models have not yet been established, and it is likely to be a hybrid model incorporating crypto perpetuals with traditional futures, prediction markets, secondary spot markets, contracts for difference (CFDs), and other primitives.
With Kalshi’s recent entry into the perpetual futures market and Hyperliquid entering the outcome prediction market with HIP-4, we are witnessing a significant convergence among all these different pricing tools. The pricing of tokenized pre-IPO startups is likely to act as a catalyst for creating a new category of derivatives—one that is more efficient and user-friendly for everyday users.
3.4 Legal Structure and Regulation
From a legal structure perspective, many of these tokenized startup tools—such as Street’s ERC-S, MetaDAO’s DAO LLC, and SPV-backed tokens—remain novel and experimental, having not yet been tested by regulatory authorities with strict enforcement intentions.
Even though the United States recently enacted the Clarification Act targeting digital commodities, it has not addressed this issue regarding tokenized equity.
From public statements, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission appears to categorize these tokenized startups into two distinct groups based on whether the tokens are issued directly by the company or by a third party.
Tokens sponsored by the issuer are securities themselves, merely in a different form, and are therefore subject to traditional securities laws. Whether the official ledger is on-chain (transferring tokens equals transferring shares) or off-chain (tokens trigger ledger updates), they are treated exactly like common stocks: they must be registered or qualify for an exemption, and must fulfill all standard disclosure and reporting obligations.
The treatment of third-party tokens depends on what they actually represent. Custodial tokens are securities rights under Article 8 of the Uniform Commercial Code, meaning they are actual securities transactions, but they represent a claim against custodied shares rather than the shares themselves, which means you are still exposed to the risk of the custodian’s bankruptcy.
Synthetic tokens are fully independent securities issued by third parties, carrying no rights to the underlying company and requiring separate registration or exemption: linked securities (notes or SPVs tracking a target value) fall into this category; while security-based swaps (such as perpetual contracts in the style of Ventuals) are the most restricted and are prohibited from being offered to ordinary U.S. retail investors unless registered and traded on a national exchange.
Conclusion
Whether it’s pre-market perpetual contracts, SPVs, closed-end funds, or tender offers on the secondary market, each instrument seeks to reclaim for the public the opportunity once freely granted by public markets: early, liquid exposure to companies during their most rapid growth phases, rather than leaving it exclusively to growth equity funds.
Today, we recognize that this demand is real, but the infrastructure is still underdeveloped. For tokens, the implications run even deeper. The past few years have been a crisis of identity: project tokens have been relegated to second-class status, governance has become an empty promise, and value has accumulated elsewhere.
Reimagining the issuance mechanism to grant tokens genuine claim rights over rising risk scales may be the defining mission of this era. With infrastructure unlike anything seen in the first wave, tokens may finally fulfill the core vision promised during their early frenzy.