I've been observing a very interesting phenomenon lately—those super unicorns that were once firmly locked in the primary market are quietly moving onto the blockchain.

Think about what has happened over the past few years. Stablecoins, U.S. bonds, funds, U.S. stocks—these traditional assets have been moved onto the blockchain one after another, transforming into tradable tokenized products. You can now smoothly buy and sell Tesla on the chain, which was unimaginable five years ago. But there’s a huge gap—those primary markets holding top unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI still keep the doors closed to ordinary people.

But the situation has been changing since last year. Robinhood tested on-chain trading of private equity assets like OpenAI in Europe, Hyperliquid launched SpaceX perpetual contracts, and recently MSX directly introduced a Pre-IPO zone, allowing users to directly subscribe to tokenized unicorn equity on-chain. These actions seem different but point in the same direction—Pre-IPO markets are embracing on-chain.

I believe this is not just a technological innovation but a profound change in the structure of the capital markets.

For a long time, the story of early-stage investments has been told like this: Masayoshi Son invested in Alibaba in 6 minutes, a16z entered Meta early, Sequoia Capital positioned itself in Coinbase. The core of these stories is one—getting in early before quality assets go public to earn the valuation difference between private and public markets. Venture capital takes on high risk, endures long cycles, and ultimately covers overall losses with a few successful projects—that’s the game.

But the Pre-IPO stage is completely different. At this point, companies have grown into super unicorns like SpaceX and ByteDance, their business models are extremely mature, risks have been significantly reduced, and there’s even a certain level of secondary market certainty. More painfully, at this low-risk stage, the returns before and after IPO are still astonishing—Figma surged over 250% on its first day, Bullish rose 290%.

In other words, institutions take the biggest slice of the cake when risks are lowest, while ordinary investors can only buy in on the secondary market after the bell rings. From a capital efficiency perspective, this is inherently inefficient.

So the question is: since blockchain can lower the access threshold for U.S. stocks, can it also, before unicorns go public, enable users to share in the valuation growth through tokenization?

Currently, two paths are being explored. One is the perpetual contract model like Hyperliquid, where developers can deploy contracts for Pre-IPO assets like SpaceX and OpenAI, allowing users to bet on price movements without actual equity. The advantage is low barrier, fast trading, but essentially it’s gambling, and compliance is still in a gray area.

The other, more difficult but more legitimate path, is to enable users to actually hold tokenized equity within a compliant framework. Robinhood tested this in Europe last year, and recently MSX adopted the same approach, partnering with the US-regulated platform Republic, using SPV structures to tokenize real Pre-IPO equity. This means the tokens you hold correspond to real equity, protected by law, and assets are held by licensed custodians.

These two paths represent different choices—one pursues DeFi’s efficiency and liquidity, the other follows traditional financial regulatory logic. But regardless of the path, a consensus is forming: a “first-half market” between the primary and secondary markets is taking shape.

From Robinhood to MSX, from Europe to Asia-Pacific, this trend is clear. Robinhood’s experiment in Europe last year was significant, validating that regulatory frameworks can be flexibly adapted, and proving that users have genuine demand for such products. But Europe is just the beginning; the Asia-Pacific market’s size and growth rate are even larger, and here, a true entry-level platform has been missing.

MSX’s recent launch of the Pre-IPO zone is filling this gap. They partnered with Republic to replicate the verified compliant pathway in the Asia-Pacific market, initially opening on-chain subscriptions for unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, Lambda Labs, with minimums as low as 10 USDT. To some extent, MSX is creating an “Asia version of Robinhood”—connecting scarce pre-IPO equity with global liquidity through compliant on-chain structures in the complex regulatory environment of Asia-Pacific.

I believe the logic here is quite simple—this is a two-way push. Ordinary users need a truly equal entry point to share in the growth of top-tier unicorns before they go public, rather than waiting outside the secondary market; private equity shareholders also crave to bring in global incremental capital, using on-chain liquidity to unlock more exit options. Both sides’ needs align perfectly.

From a technical perspective, tokenization infrastructure is already mature, on-chain compliance frameworks are gradually becoming clearer, and trust among institutions and users is slowly but steadily building. But a logical foundation doesn’t automatically mean a breakthrough; questions about whether the compliance pathways are sufficiently clear, whether risk controls are truly reliable, and whether liquidity can be effectively matched are all necessary conditions.

More importantly, more platforms need to be willing to bear the cost of “pioneering,” using real products and real users to carve out replicable paths. By 2026, will on-chain Pre-IPO be a fleeting concept or the beginning of a true reshaping of capital market access rules? The answer will be revealed soon.