Private Markets Access

The structural shift

For most of the twentieth century, companies went public relatively early and public shareholders participated in most of the value creation that followed. That dynamic has inverted: average time from founding to IPO has lengthened considerably, commonly cited as ten to twelve years in the 2020s against four to five years in the 1990s, and by the time a company lists it often already carries a valuation in the hundreds of billions. Vlad Tenev names the resulting gap directly as "the greatest remaining inequity and opportunity in our capital markets": companies going public at valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars are unlikely to then hand public investors the thousand-to-ten-thousand-times returns earlier market eras produced, because the window for that kind of appreciation increasingly closes before a retail investor, the hundred-thousand-dollar investor asking where to put it, can access the stock at all.¹

Who is shut out, and why

"If you want early exposure or even medium to late stage exposure as a retail investor, you're largely shut out." The exclusion operates on three levels at once: regulatory, since accredited-investor rules limit private placements to people who already clear a high net-worth threshold; structural, since private secondary markets require broker relationships and minimums that ordinary retail investors rarely meet; and informational, since there is no continuous price discovery and private valuations are set at isolated, opaque points in time rather than updated daily the way a public stock price is. The practical result is that the same generation of retail investors who opened brokerage accounts and pushed commissions to zero now watches the appreciation of companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stripe happen entirely in a market they cannot enter.

Tokenization as the proposed fix

The roadmap runs in two stages. Public equity tokenization is already live in limited form, bringing US equities into extended trading hours through blockchain rails and building both the underlying technology and a regulatory track record. Private equity tokenization is the longer-term goal: putting private company shares on a blockchain to create continuous, liquid markets where none currently exist. Tenev's framing of the ambition: "the real power is taking assets that are not easily liquid and tradable 24/7 and putting them on the blockchain." He estimates a timeline of five to ten years before the approach reaches anything like ubiquity, and the version he describes explicitly requires working with companies directly rather than tokenizing shares without their consent, a slower path than some competing approaches in the same space but one intended to be more durable.

Open questions

Company consent is the real gating factor on the stated timeline, and it is unclear whether that pace holds or whether broader securities-tokenization frameworks accelerate it from the regulatory side instead. Private valuations are set episodically at funding rounds rather than continuously, and on-chain trading would introduce real-time price discovery that some private companies may experience as a liability, since continuous mark-to-market pricing invites both management distraction and competitive information leakage that a private company does not face today. There is also a retail-suitability question: the same investors who already hold volatile public securities with minimal research would be holding tokenized pre-IPO equity carrying volatile premiums and none of the disclosure requirements that accompany a public listing.