As more and more companies increase their value before going public, Pre-IPOs are becoming a new market entry point

Corporate Value Growth Is Shifting Toward the Pre-Listing Stage

For a long time, IPOs have often been seen as a crucial watershed in a company's growth. Many companies only truly come into the public investors' view after going public, and the market mainly completes value discovery through open trading. However, in the past decade, this pattern has been changing. An increasing number of tech companies are choosing to stay longer in the private market. Ample financing channels, mature venture capital systems, and the continuously expanding private capital scale enable companies to secure ongoing development funds without going public. By the time they actually initiate an IPO, these companies often already have a large user base, mature business models, and extremely high market valuations.

Taking the recently high-profile SpaceX as an example, market expectations for its IPO valuation have already reached between $1.75 trillion and $1.8 trillion. For such a large enterprise, most of the value growth has actually occurred before going public, with the public market mainly serving the functions of liquidity and price discovery.

This shift also means that investors are beginning to pay more attention to the transition phase of companies moving from private to public markets.

Why Has the Pre-Listing Market Long Maintained Participation Barriers?

Although the market often discusses star unicorn companies, few people can actually participate in Pre-IPO opportunities. The traditional pre-listing market usually focuses on institutional investors, high-net-worth clients, and professional funds. Whether it’s subscription rounds, equity transfers, or over-the-counter trading, these typically require significant capital and professional resources. At the same time, related information transparency is relatively limited, and liquidity is far lower than in mature stock markets.

For ordinary investors, they often have to wait until the company officially goes public before participating in trading.

This phenomenon has resulted in a long-standing obvious gap in the capital market: company valuations continue to grow, but most retail investors cannot access this stage. As more companies choose to delay their IPOs, this demand is becoming increasingly prominent.

What Does the Emergence of Pre-IPOs Signify?

Pre-IPOs can be understood as a digital participation mechanism built around the pre-listing stage of a company. It does not directly change the company's financing methods, nor is it equivalent to traditional equity investment. Instead, it attempts to establish a more open value tracking and market participation system.

From an overall process perspective, Pre-IPOs typically include several key steps:

• Project opens for subscription
• Users submit subscription funds
• System completes allocation
• Asset certificates are issued
• Subsequent market trading and holding

Through this model, the pre-listing stage begins to possess a certain degree of market liquidity and price discovery capability.

For investors, this means that besides waiting for the company's official IPO, they can also engage with the relevant market earlier.

How Does Gate Build a Digital Participation Mechanism for Pre-IPOs?

In the digital Pre-IPO space, Gate has launched a dedicated Pre-IPO product system. Its core idea is not to provide actual shares of unlisted companies but to enable user participation in the value tracking process of target companies before listing through digital subscription and asset certificate mechanisms.

Users can participate in subscriptions using supported assets on the platform, receive corresponding asset certificates after project allocation, and hold or trade them according to product rules.

Compared to traditional over-the-counter markets, this model has several features:

• Relatively simplified participation process
• Lower capital thresholds
• Transparent subscription and allocation rules
• Future trading capabilities

From a market development perspective, this digital model is attempting to transform the originally relatively closed pre-listing market into a more open participation system.

Why Has SpaceX Become a Market Focus?

To understand the market value of Pre-IPOs, SpaceX is undoubtedly a representative case. Over the past few years, SpaceX has gradually grown from a commercial aerospace company into one of the most influential tech firms globally. Besides its rocket launch business, the rapid expansion of Starlink has also brought continuous revenue growth. Meanwhile, the market maintains high expectations for its future development space. On one hand, commercial space remains in a long-term growth cycle; on the other, satellite internet, global communication networks, and future space infrastructure development all provide vast growth opportunities.

Because of this, as SpaceX’s IPO timetable becomes clearer, market attention to its pre-listing stage has also surged. Many investors are pondering: if a company already has huge market expectations before officially listing, should there also be a corresponding price discovery mechanism at this stage?

How the SPCX Case Helps Understand Pre-IPOs

In Gate’s first Pre-IPO project, SPCX became an important window for many users to understand this mechanism. It’s important to emphasize that SPCX is not SpaceX’s stock itself, nor does it represent investors holding SpaceX equity. Its essence is a value-mapping asset mainly used to track the target company's value changes.

These assets typically have the following characteristics:

• Do not represent actual shares
• Do not have voting rights
• Do not participate in corporate governance
• Value is related to the market performance of the target company

Therefore, it is closer to a digital value-mapping tool rather than traditional stock.

For the market, the significance of such products lies in providing channels to observe and trade expectations before listing. When different investors form varying judgments about a company's future value, market prices will gradually form.

The Pre-Listing Market Is Becoming a New Price Discovery Stage

In traditional capital markets, price discovery mainly occurs after a company goes public. But as more large tech companies delay IPOs, the market is beginning to realize that the pre-listing stage also contains a wealth of valuation information. Progress in company financing, business growth rates, industry competition patterns, and market sentiment all influence investors’ future valuation judgments.

Therefore, the pre-listing market is no longer just a waiting zone but is gradually evolving into an independent price discovery stage.

From this perspective, Pre-IPOs are not just a new product type but also a sign of a structural change in the capital market. The stage once accessible only to a few institutions is now gradually opening to a broader user base through digital means.

Summary

As large tech companies accumulate higher valuations before going public, the boundary between primary and public markets is shifting. More investors are paying attention to the valuation formation process before the official IPO, not just the trading performance afterward. Pre-IPOs have emerged as a new market model in this context. By digital subscription, asset certificate distribution, and subsequent trading mechanisms, they provide a new way to participate in the pre-listing stage.

Taking SpaceX and SPCX as examples, it’s clear that the market is no longer solely focused on when a company will finally go public but is beginning to pay attention to how expectations are formed beforehand, how pricing is completed, and how a more transparent price discovery mechanism is established. For the overall trend of integrating digital assets with traditional finance, this could also become a direction worth continuous observation in the future.

Risk Reminder

This article is for informational sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice. Pre-IPO related products carry high risks and uncertainties; target companies may face valuation fluctuations, changes in listing processes, and market liquidity risks. Please fully understand the relevant mechanisms and potential risks before participating, and make cautious decisions based on your own situation.