Next year's biggest IPO, how will SpaceX, valued at $1.5 trillion, participate?

By: blockbeats|2025/12/11 01:30:02

On-chain stock trading has rapidly evolved in the US market. Apart from stocks that are already listed and can be directly traded on the secondary market, many high-quality companies now receive significant funding through private placements without the need for an IPO, such as OpenAI and SpaceX.

For these private placement equity holdings, retail investors often find it difficult to participate. Investment opportunities usually only arise after an IPO, with a few institutional investors monopolizing pre-IPO investment opportunities. Although in the traditional finance field, platforms like Ustockplus under Korea's Dunamu, as well as Forge and EquityZen in the US, allow retail investors to purchase private placement equity within existing regulatory frameworks, these traditional financial platforms operate on a peer-to-peer matching basis. If no one is willing to sell, buyers still have limited access, leading to poor liquidity due to unpredictable transaction volumes.

So, would the situation improve with pre-IPO private equity + blockchain? Currently, there are three platforms on-chain—Ventuals, PreStocks, and Jarsy—that provide pre-IPO private equity trading. Let's take a look at their respective characteristics.

Ventuals

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Ventuals is an IPO pre-equity perpetual contract platform built on HIP-3. On Ventuals, traders do not trade based on stock prices but on their expectations of the company's total valuation fluctuations. Holding a position on a pre-IPO company on Ventuals does not imply actual ownership of the company—only speculation on its valuation changes.

As it is not tied to actual equity, Ventuals is essentially a platform for speculating on company valuations. The advantage of this model is that Ventuals can quickly list a large number of pre-IPO company targets and respond to market trends. Moreover, having no underlying assets to a certain extent can help avoid traditional regulations.

However, Ventuals' drawback is that price manipulation is easily facilitated due to reliance on oracle feeds. Private company valuation data is inherently opaque, with low update frequencies. Additionally, Ventuals recently reduced the weight of external oracle feeds to 0.25 and increased the marking price weight to 0.75, raising concerns among some players about potential market manipulation.

PreStocks

PreStocks is built on the Solana network. Unlike Ventuals, PreStocks truly tokenizes pre-IPO equity held directly or indirectly by entities investing in the underlying company. The team mentioned on their website that they will regularly release third-party verification reports to ensure that the token supply corresponds to the actual equity held and will also publish them upon active requests that can cover audit fees.

Due to the involvement of actual equity, users from countries such as China, the United States, Canada, etc., cannot practically use the platform's minting and redemption services. While it is still possible to buy and sell these equity tokens on-chain without KYC, if one wants to buy and wait for listing before redeeming these tokens for USDC, KYC is required. Additionally, despite having actual equity backing, holding equity tokens does not imply ownership, voting rights, dividend rights, or similar privileges.

PreStocks' main advantage lies in its good integration with the DeFi ecosystem, allowing direct trading in wallets such as Jupiter, OKX, and participation in low-cost lending or leverage trading within some dApps in the Solana ecosystem.

Jarsy

Similar to PreStocks, Jarsy also has actual equity support. However, compared to PreStocks, Jarsy is more like a blockchain-technology-based pre-IPO equity investment platform rather than a trading platform. This is because equity tokens on Jarsy are non-transferable and cannot be used in DeFi; they have their own built-in trading system and trading can only occur on the platform.

Nevertheless, Jarsy currently provides better transparency and disclosure compared to PreStocks.

Jarsy and PreStocks share some similarities and differences. Firstly, the minimum investment amounts for both platforms are very low, with Jarsy at $10 and PreStocks having none, which is beneficial for users worldwide as it lowers the barrier to entry for pre-IPO equity investments. However, a downside is that the amount of equity they can hold is relatively low; for example, xAI's equity token TVL on Jarsy is only about $1.1 million, whereas SpaceX's is approximately $1.7 million. The limited scale of actual pre-IPO equity holdings can directly lead to liquidity issues, where even seemingly small orders can cause significant price fluctuations.

Conclusion

Looking at the three companies above, liquidity remains a challenging issue for pre-IPO equity tokenization, making it difficult for large on-chain funds to enter this space.

However, the benefits are also obvious. Retail investors previously had almost no way to invest in companies like SpaceX and OpenAI before their IPOs. Now, through blockchain technology, a door that has always been closed is opened.

In fact, Echo, the on-chain funding platform created by Cobie and acquired by Coinbase for $375 million, is doing something similar. They have previously conducted a $10 million 1X Technologies Series C round of financing in a private group, although they did not tokenize equity.

It's all still early days.

Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has shown strong momentum across multiple dimensions. The mainstream discussion has focused on Coinbase's official entry into the prediction market through the acquisition of The Clearing Company, as well as the intense controversy within the AAVE community regarding token incentives and governance rights.

In terms of ecosystem development, Solana has introduced the innovative Kora fee layer aimed at reducing user transaction costs; meanwhile, the Perp DEX competition has intensified, with the showdown between Hyperliquid and Lighter sparking widespread community discussion on the future of decentralized derivatives.

I. Mainstream Topics

1. Coinbase Acquires The Clearing Company, Officially Entering Prediction Market

This week, Coinbase announced the acquisition of The Clearing Company, marking another significant move to deepen its presence in this field after last week's announcement of launching a prediction market on its platform.

The Clearing Company's founder, Toni Gemayel, and the team will join Coinbase to jointly drive the development of the prediction market business.

Coinbase's Product Lead, Shan Aggarwal, stated that the growth of the prediction market is still in its early stages and predicts that 2026 will be the breakout year for this field.

The community has reacted positively to this, generally believing that Coinbase's entry will bring significant traffic and compliance advantages to the prediction market. However, this has also sparked discussions about the industry's competitive landscape.

Jai Bhavnani, Founder of Rivalry, commented that for startups, if their product model proves to be successful, industry giants like Coinbase have ample reason to replicate it.

This serves as a reminder to all entrepreneurs in the crypto space that they must build significant moats to withstand competition pressure from these giants.

2. Kalshi Launches Kalshi Research and Integrates BSC Network

Regulated prediction market platform Kalshi launched its research arm, Kalshi Research, this week, aimed at opening its internal data to the academic community and researchers to facilitate exploration of prediction market-related topics.

Its inaugural research report highlights Kalshi's outperformance in predicting inflation compared to Wall Street's traditional models. Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara commented that the power of prediction markets lies in the valuable data they generate, and it is now time to better utilize this data.

Meanwhile, Kalshi announced its support for the BNB Chain (BSC), allowing users to deposit and withdraw BNB and USDT via the BSC network.

This move is seen as a significant step for Kalshi to open its platform to a broader crypto user base, aiming to unlock access to the world's largest prediction market. Furthermore, Kalshi also revealed plans to host the first Prediction Market Summit in 2026 to further drive industry engagement and development.

3. AAVE Token Incentive Controversy Persists as Founders and Whales Increase Holdings Against the Market Trend

The AAVE community recently engaged in heated debates around an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP) titled "AAVE Tokenomics Alignment Phase One - Ownership Governance," aiming to transfer ownership and control of the Aave brand from Aave Labs to Aave DAO.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov publicly stated his intention to vote against the proposal, believing it oversimplifies the complex legal and operational structure, potentially slowing down the development process of core products like Aave V4.

The community's reaction was polarized. Some criticized Stani for adopting a "double standard" in governance and questioned whether his team had siphoned off protocol revenue, while others supported his cautious stance, arguing that significant governance changes require more thorough discussion.

This controversy highlights the tension between the ideal of DAO governance in DeFi projects and the actual power held by core development teams.

Despite governance disputes putting pressure on the AAVE token price, on-chain data shows that Stani Kulechov himself has purchased millions of dollars' worth of AAVE in the past few hours.

Simultaneously, a whale address, 0xDDC4, which had been quiet for 6 months, once again spent 500 ETH (approximately $1.53 million) to purchase 9,629 AAVE tokens. Data indicates that this whale has accumulated nearly 40,000 AAVE over the past year but is currently in an unrealized loss position.

The founder and whale's increased holdings during market volatility were interpreted by some investors as a confidence signal in AAVE's long-term value.

4. Top Articles: DeFi Curators and Ethereum Annual Summary

In this week's top article, Morpho Labs' "Curator Explained" detailed the role of "curators" in DeFi.

The article likened curators to asset managers in traditional finance, who design, deploy, and manage on-chain vaults, providing users with a one-click diversified investment portfolio.

Unlike traditional fund managers, DeFi curators execute strategies automatically through non-custodial smart contracts, allowing users to maintain full control of their assets. The article offered a new perspective on the specialization and risk management in the DeFi space.

Another widely circulated article, "Ethereum 2025: From Experiment to Global Infrastructure," provided a comprehensive summary of Ethereum's development over the past year. The article noted that 2025 is a crucial year for Ethereum's transition from an experimental project to global financial infrastructure. Through the Pectra and Fusaka hard forks, Ethereum achieved significant reductions in account abstraction and transaction costs.

Furthermore, the SEC's clarification of Ethereum's "non-securities" nature and the launch of tokenized funds on the Ethereum mainnet by traditional financial giants like JPMorgan marked Ethereum's gaining recognition from mainstream institutions. The article suggested that whether it is the continued growth of DeFi, the thriving L2 ecosystem, or the integration with the AI field, Ethereum's vision as the "world computer" is gradually becoming a reality.

II. Mainstream Ecosystem Updates

1. Solana: Launches Kora Fee Layer and propAMM Data Research

The Solana Foundation engineering team released a fee layer solution called Kora this week.

Kora is a fee relayer and signatory node designed to provide the Solana ecosystem with a more flexible transaction fee payment method. Through Kora, users will be able to achieve gas-free transactions or choose to pay network fees using any stablecoin or SPL token. This innovation is seen as an important step in lowering the barrier of entry for new users and improving Solana network's availability.

Additionally, a deep research report on propAMM (proactive market maker) sparked community interest. The report's data analysis of propAMMs on Solana like HumidiFi indicated that Solana has achieved, or even surpassed, the level of transaction execution quality in traditional finance (TradFi) markets.

For example, on the SOL-USDC trading pair, HumidiFi is able to provide a highly competitive spread for large trades (0.4-1.6 bps), which is already better than the trading slippage of some mid-cap stocks in traditional markets.

Research suggests that propAMM is making the vision of the "Internet Capital Market" a reality, with Solana emerging as the prime venue for all of this to happen.

2. Perp DEX: Hyperliquid vs. Lighter Competition Intensifies

The competition in the perpetual contract DEX (Perp DEX) space is becoming increasingly heated.

In its latest official article, Hyperliquid has positioned its emerging competitor, Lighter, alongside centralized exchanges like Binance, referring to it as a platform utilizing a centralized sequencer. Hyperliquid emphasizes its transparency advantage of being "fully on-chain, operated by a validator network, and with no hidden state."

The community widely interprets this as Hyperliquid declaring "war" on Lighter. The technical differences between the two platforms have also become a focal point of discussion: Hyperliquid focuses on ultimate on-chain transparency, while Lighter emphasizes achieving "verifiable execution" through zero-knowledge proofs to provide users with a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB)-like trading experience.

This battle over the future direction of decentralized derivatives exchanges is expected to peak in 2026.

Meanwhile, discussions about Lighter's trading fees have surfaced. Some users have pointed out that Lighter charged as much as 81 basis points (0.81%) for a $2 million USD/JPY forex trade, far exceeding the near-zero spreads of traditional forex brokers.

Some argue that Lighter does not follow a B-book model that bets against market makers, instead anchoring its prices to the TradFi market, and the high fees may be related to the current liquidity or market maker balance incentives. Providing a more competitive spread for real-world assets (RWA) in the highly volatile crypto market is a key issue Lighter will need to address in the future.