Author: Jay Yu
Compiled by: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
For the world's fastest-growing tech companies, the public markets are not what they used to be. Thirty years ago, Amazon went public three years after its founding, valued at $438 million. Netscape went public in its first IPO just eighteen months after being founded.
But today, the fastest-growing companies (Stripe, SpaceX, OpenAI, Ramp) typically remain private for over a decade. The exposure to high-growth periods that investors could once easily access in public markets has now been quietly intercepted by private capital at ever-increasing paper valuations.
"To put it cynically, [venture capital] intercepted the growth stage of early public companies. Amazon went public with a market cap of less than $1 billion. That's unimaginable today." – Bill Gurley
The market has reacted with some patchwork fixes: Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), secondary market platforms, tender offers, and other tools designed to satisfy investors' appetite for growth-stage risk assets. But these are patches, not fundamental solutions.
What investors truly crave may be the vision that tech IPOs carried thirty years ago: broad, liquid exposure to generational companies, sharing in venture-scale returns.
Tokenized risk assets could be part of the answer. This article explores how tokenized startups could help rebalance these disconnected markets, centered on three questions:
(1) Why now is the right time for tokenized startups to develop
(2) What the landscape of tokenized startups looks like
(3) What are the key opportunities, challenges, and unresolved tensions hindering the scaling of this field.
Part 1: Why Tokenized Startups Are Timely?
Tokenized startups are at the crossroads of three major trends:
(1) The explosive growth of patchwork tools like SPVs as the de facto liquidity mechanism for generational tech companies
(2) The rapid growth of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), covering money markets, public stocks, commodities, and more
(3) The breakdown of the "token vs. equity" consensus, where project tokens are increasingly becoming second-class citizens compared to venture equity.
1.1 The Rise of SPVs
Ten years ago, SPVs were a niche tool, a way to pool capital outside traditional venture capital or public financing structures. But over the last two years, they have become a key part of capital strategy, with platforms like AngelList, Carta, and Assure making setting up SPVs for specific opportunities and companies easier than ever.
Secondary SPVs, in particular, have grown over 545% in the last two years, with capital raised increasing more than 10x. These makeshift market structures capture significant market growth: the weighted basket of Hiive's top 50 secondary assets achieved 49.1% growth in 2025, significantly outperforming the S&P 500.
This suggests investors are using makeshift private market structures to restore functions public markets once performed more smoothly: access, liquidity, and price discovery. As companies stay private longer, SPVs have become one of the primary alternatives.
1.2 RWA, Tokenization, and the Perpetualization of Everything
The second trend is the rise of tokenization and perpetual markets across asset classes.
In Q1 2026, the value of on-chain RWAs reached approximately $320 billion. While the largest RWA asset class remains US Treasuries (used as collateral for stablecoins), significant growth has also been seen in asset classes like commodities, stocks, and asset-backed credit (e.g., Figure's home equity loans).
As RWAs gain adoption, we can see the tokenization supply chain maturing: spanning from issuers, custodians, to regulatory frameworks.
Simultaneously, perpetual futures have gained immense traction over the past two years with the rise of perpetual decentralized exchanges (perp-DEXes) like Hyperliquid. Compared to derivatives with expiration dates, perpetual futures have no expiration, offering practical advantages in execution, easier risk understanding, and native 24/7 trading support.
Projects like TradeXYZ are also expanding perpetual futures beyond pure cryptocurrency pairs (like BTC-USDC) to other asset classes, including US and Korean stocks, commodities, and equity indices, offering a standardized approach like HIP-3 for creating new perpetual markets.
1.3 The Breakdown of the "Token vs. Equity" Consensus
The third growing trend is the value capture dilemma between tokens and equity.
Decentralized finance project tokens like UNI and AAVE explicitly stated at issuance that they do not represent equity, addressing regulatory concerns. This created a "token vs. equity consensus," where project tokens should act as synthetic instruments, granting owners "governance rights" over protocol aspects, with promises of fee capture as a value capture mechanism.
However, this created a two-tier system with zero-sum value capture, making token holders second-class citizens compared to equity holders.
This problem became clear in recent events, such as the Aave DAO vs. Labs standoff and the controversial Circle acquisition of Axelar, where token holder interests were subordinated to equity interests.
All this prompts 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 tokenized exposure to companies with venture-scale upside, allowing the general public early access to generational companies as they once did in public markets.
In this way, tokens become a re-architecture of traditional IPO mechanisms, opening access to the hottest giant companies for a broader public.
Part 2: The Landscape of Tokenized Startups
2.1 Current Design Approaches and Trading Volumes
Today, tokenized startups feature a variety of approaches and designs across two main dimensions: investment mechanisms and startup stages.
Investment mechanisms for tokenized startups range from SPV instruments holding equity (like PreStocks), closed-end funds offering access to company equity (like Robinhood Ventures), to pure perpetual futures offering price exposure without underlying equity ownership (like TradeXYZ and Ventuals).
Startup stages range from early-stage companies (like those on MetaDAO's platform) to growth-stage assets, and household-name pre-IPO companies (like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI).
Mapping the major players in this space and their scale (24-hour trading volume as of May 30), we notice several evident patterns.
First, the biggest trend is that late-stage (especially pre-IPO startup) platforms have trading volumes over 10x higher than early-stage ones. In particular, users seem to gravitate towards investing in well-known companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, Anduril, and OpenAI, regardless of which platform provides these assets.
Second, equity-based tokenized startups (e.g., via Robinhood Ventures and PreStocks) typically have higher trading volumes than their perpetual counterpart platforms. Part of this may simply be due to Robinhood's distribution advantage as a platform, and TradeXYZ's conservative strategy of rolling out perpetuals one by one.
Notably, TradeXYZ's launch of a perpetual for Cerebras Systems has been an outsized success, with daily trading volume exceeding $30 million and providing accurate price discovery within less than a 3% margin from the debut price.
Third, there is a strong power law concentration effect across this landscape, with platform volumes often dominated by less than three assets. For example, MetaDAO's volume is dominated by META, Avici, and Umbra; Street's volume is dominated by KLED.
Currently (as of May 30, 2026), TradeXYZ only offers SpaceX pairs, and SpaceX also accounts for roughly half of PreStock's weekly volume. This outsized power law effect likely indicates that, for most platforms, traders are more loyal to high-quality, high-recognition assets than to the underlying platform itself.
2.2 Project Design Architectures
We can also dive into individual projects within this landscape map to closely examine the trade-offs of various design schemes in this field, from perpetual exposure to SPV-backed equity structures.
Note: The platform comparisons and characteristic 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 infancy, with a design space full of opportunities and challenges.
3.1 Transfer Consent and Team Alignment
Currently, one of the most pressing questions for spot tokenized startup platforms is whether these projects align with or go against the interests of company founding teams, especially given that platform volumes are disproportionately concentrated in 1 to 3 high-quality assets.
This is particularly true for high-profile, pre-IPO companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, which carry the bulk of pre-market demand and trading volume.
Without team consent, a company may publicly announce opposition to tokenization, causing a sale to be invalidated and subsequently leading to a token value crash, as seen with Anthropic's opposition to secondary SPVs and OpenAI's opposition to Robinhood's stock tokens.
Typically, growth-stage companies pursuing an IPO have four apparent motivations: (1) access to public market capital; (2) real-time pricing; (3) liquidity exit for founding teams and investors; (4) prestige signaling.
Today, the proliferation of growth-stage "mega funds" provides a remarkably robust and abundant financing environment for the hottest startups, often at extremely high valuations. This landscape weakens motivations (1) and (2) for growth-stage companies to go public: they no longer need to turn to public markets for capital, and real-time pricing carries the risk of downward price corrections.
Therefore, in today's financing environment, a hot growth-stage startup would only enter the public market if a large number of early employees and investors desire immediate liquidity (as with Facebook's 2012 IPO) or as a prestige symbol representing maturity.
For a spot tokenized startup platform seeking board approval for direct ownership pathways in today's financing environment, these latter two motivations carry much more weight.
Traditional secondary market brokers like Forge and Hiive cater more to the liquidity motivation, while high-profile closed-end funds like Robinhood Ventures and USVC arguably cater to the prestige motivation.
Nevertheless, beyond traditional IPO motivations, a series of emerging designs have appeared, such as tokenized startup baskets, tokenized accelerator models, and tokenized community offerings, which could address this founder alignment issue:
Tokenized startup baskets refer to tradable portfolios of growth-stage startups, rather than a single tokenized company.
This is an avenue provided by closed-end funds like Robinhood Ventures. This mechanism can fulfill liquidity, prestige, and even capital access motivations while mitigating the downward revaluation pressure from "real-time pricing" by using Net Asset Value (NAV) multiples (somewhat similar to DAT).
The tokenized accelerator model applies the traditional accelerator and incubator model (e.g., YC, HF0, South Park Commons), helping startups go from 0 to 1 in exchange for their consent to tokenize their equity.
We see platforms like Street and MetaDAO effectively providing this model; they address the founder alignment issue by being on the founders' side and tangibly helping them grow.
Tokenized community offerings may be the most interesting and worthwhile model to explore for tokenized startups. As demonstrated by Uniswap's 2020 airdrop, tokens can be excellent incentives for daily users using a product every day.
If executed well, token airdrops can lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by subsidizing natural user activity, facilitating project marketing, and increasing user satisfaction, especially for consumer-facing projects.
For example, Revolut conducted a community equity financing round, raising $1.3 million from early users at a $40 million valuation. This served a marketing function, turning users into owners and advocates, with those early supporters seeing 400x returns.
However, token airdrops can also be a double-edged sword; many crypto project airdrops have been plagued by farming behaviors, insider allocation accusations, and immediate sell pressure.
3.2 Non-US Jurisdictions
Another path to bypass the founder alignment issue is to go global. Much of the current discussion (and trading volume) around tokenized startups takes a US-centric view, focusing on the hottest US companies and assuming a US public market listing.
But US public and private capital markets already serve growth-stage companies exceptionally well, making it difficult to justify the additional benefits of a tokenized offering to a company.
This may not be the case in other regions, where local capital markets may be inefficient, failing to provide the best liquidity or pricing for the fastest-growing companies. For example, Wise initially listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021.
However, in May 2026, it moved its primary listing to Nasdaq in the US, believing it could attract a more liquid market, reach a broader retail and institutional investor base, and receive more generous valuation multiples.
This geographical divergence in valuation and capital access is also evident in the difference in valuation multiples between US and Chinese AI companies.
US AI leaders typically command Price-to-Sales (P/S) ratios of 15 to 40x, while Chinese AI firms have much more conservative P/S ratios, around 5 to 15x. This discount may be partly attributed to capital access; Chinese capital markets are generally harder to enter than US markets.
This geographical valuation arbitrage becomes particularly interesting as different parts of cutting-edge supply chains in AI, robotics, semiconductors, and biotech disperse globally, with related companies listing on Asian and European markets.
Despite this structural advantage for non-US jurisdictions in tokenized startups, current empirical experiments and trading volumes remain limited. This may be due to the difficulty of finding high-demand startups willing to experiment on their cap tables, coupled with complex local regulatory environments regarding foreign investment and tokenization.
Korea is a particularly interesting non-US market for tokenized startups.
Korea has:
(1) Several nationally-leading companies within the AI supply chain with global investor demand, such as Samsung and SK Hynix
(2) A new legal framework for "stock tokens";
(3) Brokerages actively focusing on pre-IPO investments;
(4) More cryptocurrency investors than stock investors.
This is perhaps part of why TradeXYZ has actively begun listing perpetuals on Korean stocks.
One of tokenization's greatest strengths is its ability to geographically arbitrage, providing global audiences with underlying access to invest in companies worldwide.
With their global liquidity base and potential to open to broader retail and institutional investors, tokenized startup platforms are likely to become part of the upgraded listing strategy for the next generation of fast-growing companies outside the US, like Wise, which lack strong domestic capital markets.
3.3 Price Discovery Design for Perpetuals
Another route for tokenized startup platforms is to employ a perpetual strategy. If what's owned is merely a synthetic instrument not representing underlying equity, then there's nothing for the board to invalidate. This sidesteps the need for team intervention and board consent. However, synthetic assets trade legality issues for price discovery challenges.
Existing perpetual markets (e.g., for crypto tokens, stocks, commodities) typically rely on liquid spot markets and reliable price oracles to manage funding rates and synthetic prices. However, by definition, private startups do not have liquid public markets.
The closest markets available are tender offers and secondary buys, which platforms like Ventuals use to anchor their funding rates. But these are often unreliable and frequently underprice the underlying asset.
For example, on Ventuals, funding rates within a +/- 5% range of the oracle price are around 15% annualized, increasing exponentially outside that range, imposing punitive fees on longs.
TradeXYZ takes the opposite approach, relying on oracle-free price discovery. For example, in the Cerebras Systems offering, TradeXYZ simply set up a Hyperp mechanism, using the market's recent marks to derive a reference price, allowing the contract to discover its own price within the narrow window between the S-1 filing and the official listing. It outperformed any other mechanism in the market.
The CBRS perpetual launched on May 1 with a $175 reference price, trading between $288 and $320 for two weeks, reaching around $340 an hour before opening, less than 3% from the actual Nasdaq opening price of $350.
This estimate was about 84% higher than the investment bank pricing of $185 and significantly more accurate than prices from secondary brokers like Hiive ($225) and Forge ($113.50). This fully demonstrates the outsized success of perpetuals as a tool.
However, this process is not necessarily scalable, as clear price discovery relies on an imminent, verifiable convergence event. If Cerebras hadn't listed within a specific timeframe, the contract would have settled at its own time-weighted average price.
In this sense, the "perpetual price discovery" mechanism ultimately looks more like a traditional futures contract and also may not necessarily apply to early-stage assets with no near-term public offering.
Therefore, the design space for perpetual-based tokenized startups remains very broad. A scalable model has not yet been established, and it will likely be a hybrid combining crypto perpetuals with traditional futures, prediction markets, secondary spot markets, Contracts for Difference (CFDs), and other primitives.
With Kalshi's recent entry into perpetuals and Hyperliquid's entry into outcome prediction markets with HIP-4, we are seeing a significant convergence between all these different pricing instruments. Pricing pre-IPO tokenized startups could become a catalyst for a new kind of derivatives space, one more efficient and usable for everyday users.
3.4 Legal Structures and Regulation
From a legal structure perspective, many of these tokenized startup instruments, such as Street's ERC-S, MetaDAO's DAO LLC, and SPV-backed tokens, are novel experiments that have yet to withstand the test of time with regulators possessing strict enforcement intent.
Even with the recent US Clarity Act for digital commodities, it did not address this issue for tokenized equity.
Judging from public statements, the SEC appears to divide these tokenized startups into two distinct categories based on whether tokens are issued directly by the company or by a third party.
Issuer-sponsored tokens are securities themselves, just in a different form, and thus subject to traditional securities laws. Whether the official ledger is on-chain (transferring the token transfers the share) or off-chain (the token triggers a ledger update), it's treated exactly like regular stock: must be registered or exempt, with all standard disclosure and reporting obligations.
Third-party tokens are handled based on what they actually convey. Custodial tokens are Article 8 security entitlements under the US Uniform Commercial Code, i.e., real securities transactions, but they are claims to custodial shares, not the shares themselves, meaning you also bear custodian bankruptcy risk.
Synthetic tokens are entirely separate securities issued by third parties, carrying no rights to the reference company, and require separate registration or exemption: linked securities (notes or SPVs tracking the target's value) fall here; while security-based swaps (e.g., Ventuals-style perpetuals) are most restricted, prohibited from being offered to ordinary US retail unless registered and traded on a national exchange.
Conclusion
Whether pre-IPO perpetuals or SPVs, closed-end funds or secondary tender offers, each tool is an attempt to win back what public markets once freely gave to the masses: the chance to get early, liquid exposure to companies during their highest-growth phases, rather than letting it be monopolized by growth equity funds.
Today, we know this demand exists, but the infrastructure remains incomplete. For tokens, the implications run deeper. The past few years have been an identity crisis: project tokens relegated to second-class citizens, governance becoming a charade, and value accumulating elsewhere.
Re-architecting the issuance mechanism, giving tokens genuine claims to risk-scale upside, may be the generational mission that could liberate them. Armed with infrastructure the first wave never had, tokens might finally deliver on the core promise they once made in their early fervor.
