A New Pre-IPO Narrative: Can Retail Investors Invest in SpaceX? The Path to Breakthrough in Private Equity Tokenization

Author: 137Labs

When MSX announced its partnership with Republic to launch a pre-IPO private equity tokenization zone for mass investors, an investment area that had long been exclusive to top institutions was being reopened.

In the past, ordinary investors could only buy shares in companies through the secondary market after they went public. Today, however, through the combination of tokenization technology and compliant channels, some people are beginning to position themselves before a company's official IPO. SpaceX, the world's most valuable unlisted company, and AI giant OpenAI are both key targets in this trend.

This is not just news about platform cooperation, but also an important signal of the accelerated evolution of the Pre-IPO sector.

I. Pre-IPO: The Stage Where "Excess Returns" Are Truly Created

In the traditional financial system, Pre-IPO refers to the final rounds of financing a company faces before it goes public. At this stage, the company has typically completed product validation and refined its business model, making its risk significantly lower than in the early venture capital stages, but its valuation has not yet been fully reassessed by the public market.

Over the past 25 years, the private equity market has generated far more value than the publicly traded stock market during the same period. This means that a significant portion of the growth potential has already been realized before companies go public. By the time companies enter the secondary market, early investors have often already secured the most explosive returns.

Take SpaceX as an example; its private valuation has increased exponentially in just a few years. Similar trends have emerged among leading companies in the AI, fintech, and crypto industries. The pre-IPO stage is often the period of most rapid valuation leaps.

The problem is that this stage has long been firmly controlled by private equity firms, venture capital firms, and family offices.

II. A market worth trillions, yet highly closed.

The total valuation of global unicorn companies has reached tens of trillions of yuan, but ordinary investors have almost no access to this market.

Traditional pre-IPO investment faces three major hurdles:

1. Extremely high capital threshold

The entry amount is often hundreds of thousands or even millions of US dollars, and the "qualified investor" standard excludes the vast majority of retail investors.

2. Extremely poor liquidity

Funds are typically locked up for many years, with exits relying on IPOs or mergers and acquisitions, during which time there is a lack of an effective secondary market.

3. Information and distribution asymmetry

For popular stocks like SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance, the best shares are almost exclusively held by a few top institutions.

Even though there are secondary private equity transfer platforms in the United States such as Forge and EquityZen, they are essentially peer-to-peer matching, resulting in low transaction efficiency and opaque pricing mechanisms.

In other words, this is a market with a huge size and considerable potential profits, but with extremely uneven entry rules.

III. Traditional Brokerages Testing the Waters: Robinhood's Signal

In June 2025, online brokerage giant Robinhood launched “stock tokens” of unlisted unicorns in the European market, including OpenAI and SpaceX.

This move sparked huge controversy. OpenAI quickly clarified that the tokens in question did not represent company equity; Elon Musk subsequently made a sarcastic comment on social media, further fueling the controversy.

The controversy reflects two realities:

• There is real demand in the market for on-chain pre-IPO assets.

Unlisted companies are highly sensitive to "spillover of pricing power".

Regardless of stance, this attempt sends a clear signal—the tokenization of primary market assets has begun to enter the mainstream financial sphere.

IV. Three Paths to On-Chain Pre-IPO

With the gradual easing of regulatory attitudes and the maturation of technological infrastructure, three typical models have emerged for on-chain pre-IPO.

1. Derivatives Model: Transaction valuation, not actual equity.

Some projects do not hold actual shares, but instead allow users to bet on changes in the valuation of unlisted companies through perpetual contracts or index contracts.

For example, platforms like Solana and others on high-performance blockchains allow users to go long or short on the "OpenAI Valuation Index." This approach has a low barrier to entry and flexible liquidity design, but the problem lies in:

Pricing depends on oracles

Private company valuations are updated infrequently.

• The regulatory attributes exist in a gray area

Its nature is closer to a prediction market than equity investment.

2. 1:1 Real Equity Tokenization (SPV Model)

This model involves setting up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to hold real shares and issuing on-chain tokens proportionally.

Representative platforms include PreStocks, which is associated with Republic, and Jarsy, built by a US team. Their core logic is:

• Raise funds first

Negotiate the acquisition of shares with the original shareholders.

Mint an equal amount of tokens based on actual holdings.

The advantage of this approach is that the assets are backed by physical assets, and investors enjoy economic rights; the disadvantages are slow expansion speed, strong dependence on offline resources, and greater compliance pressure.

3. The company proactively goes on-chain (issuer model)

Another, more disruptive approach is for companies to become the issuers themselves.

The Opening Bell platform, launched by Superstate, attempts to allow companies to issue legally valid stock tokens directly on-chain and synchronize the on-chain shareholder register.

This means that in the future, some companies may even bypass the traditional IPO process and achieve quasi-public trading on the blockchain.

If regulators ultimately approve this model, the structure of the capital market may be redefined.

V. MSX × Republic: Structural Innovation within a Compliance Framework

Returning to the collaboration between MSX and Republic.

Republic is a private securities platform operating under the SEC regulatory framework, possessing a compliant issuance and custody system, with its underlying assets held by regulated institutions. MSX, through its partnership with Republic, will:

Compliant private equity

• SPV shareholding structure

On-chain tokenization issuance

• Trading platform circulation mechanism

Combined together.

This means that MSX's Pre-IPO zone is not a "virtual mapping," but a structural innovation based on the existing regulatory framework.

For ordinary investors, the changes are mainly reflected in three aspects:

▻ Lowering the threshold

It's no longer a million-dollar entry ticket.

▻Early Valuation

Avoid incurring emotional premiums during IPO frenzy periods.

▻Liquidity Exploration

This approach attempts to improve the predicament of traditional private equity funds being locked up for many years through on-chain mechanisms.

VI. Real-world challenges still exist.

Despite the promising prospects, on-chain pre-IPO still faces three core challenges:

1. Regulatory boundaries are not yet fully defined.

2. Unlisted companies have complex attitudes towards tokenization.

3. Liquidity depth and pricing efficiency remain to be verified.

In particular, the expansion capability of the real shareholding model depends on the offline resource integration capability, while the derivatives model must solve the risks of information lag and manipulation.

The blockchain integration of pre-IPO financing is not a simple technical issue, but rather the result of a complex interplay between financial structures, regulatory systems, and corporate governance.

VII. Investment Democratization or a New Round of Risk Transfer?

Millennials and Generation Z are increasingly becoming the main investors, and they are more inclined to actively allocate high-growth assets rather than simply relying on pension systems. Unlisted tech giants have a natural appeal to this generation.

The emergence of on-chain pre-IPO has, to some extent, narrowed the opportunity gap between retail investors and institutional investors.

But at the same time, we must be clear-headed:

Limited information disclosure by unlisted companies

• Valuation may deviate significantly from actual operating conditions.

Weak liquidity may amplify volatility.

Pre-IPO investments are never low-risk investments; rather, they involve a different risk structure.

Conclusion: The wall is loosening.

From Robinhood's initial foray into tokenization to Republic's structured and compliant issuance, and MSX's inclusion of pre-IPO tokenization in its tokenization portfolio, this sector is rapidly maturing.

The once impregnable walls of the primary market are now showing cracks.

The capital market of the future may no longer strictly distinguish between "pre-listing" and "post-listing", but will achieve continuous flow in the form of on-chain assets.

When ordinary investors can participate in the growth of the world's top unlisted companies through their wallets, what we see is not just the launch of a new product, but a restructuring of capital structure.

The era of pre-IPO may have only just begun.