Open Unicorn Ticket: From Robinhood to MSX, an On-Chain Equity Experiment Before IPO

Written by: Frank

Since 2026, there seems to have been no new conflicts in RWA.

Looking back over the past five years, mainstream assets have been gradually introduced into the on-chain system, from stablecoins to U.S. Treasury bonds, to funds and U.S. stocks, becoming tradable new financial products through tokenization. This has, to some extent, validated the on-chain trading logic of secondary market assets in TradFi.

However, the primary market, the place where super unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic are hidden, remains tightly closed. Users can trade Tesla smoothly on-chain, but it is difficult to buy a "ticket" for SpaceX before the bell rings.

However, since last year, the boundaries have indeed been tested: Robinhood has been trialing tokenized private equity products like OpenAI in Europe, Hyperliquid has launched perpetual contracts for SpaceX, and this week MSX introduced on-chain Pre-IPO share offerings for unicorns like SpaceX and ByteDance.

Although these actions take different paths, they point in the same direction: Pre-IPO, this previously highly closed primary market, is attempting to embrace on-chain.

1. Pre-IPO must embrace on-chain

To understand the significance of on-chain for Pre-IPO, we must first clarify the unique role that "Pre-IPO" plays in the lifecycle of capital markets.

For a long time, the investment myths we are familiar with, such as Masayoshi Son making a decision on Alibaba in six minutes, a16z's early investment in Meta (Facebook), and Sequoia's bet on Coinbase, essentially tell the same story: positioning as an institution before quality assets go public, capturing the "scissors gap" from private equity to public market valuation leap.

Objectively speaking, this is what they deserve.

After all, early-stage venture capital is a "probability game." a16z may have invested in hundreds of failed social networks to get one Facebook, and Masayoshi Son missed or misinvested in countless internet companies before and after backing Alibaba… Ultimately, bearing extremely high trial-and-error costs, enduring a ten-year exit cycle, and finally covering overall losses with the excess returns of a few successful projects is the basic business logic of venture capital, as well as the "risk premium" that institutional capital should receive.

However, when we talk about Pre-IPO (just before going public), the logic undergoes a qualitative change.

Because this is a completely different stage, as the "last mile" before going public, the company has grown into super unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic, with extremely mature business models and clear revenue paths. Entering at this stage, compared to the risks of early-stage venture capital, has significantly reduced the risk, and even possesses a certain degree of certainty akin to a quasi-secondary market.

Ironically, in this high-certainty stage, the return rates before and after the IPO are often astonishing. For example, in 2025, two representative stocks: Figma's IPO issue price was $33, and it closed at $115.5 on the first day, an increase of over 250%. Bullish also saw a nearly 290% increase on its first day of trading.

This means that those institutions that secured shares before the bell rang still took the most lucrative piece of the cake with very low risk.

Unfortunately, even with secondary trading platforms for private company equity like Forge and EquityZen, they generally adopt a point-to-point OTC matching model, with minimum investment thresholds often in the tens of thousands of dollars, and are only available to accredited investors. Ordinary users can only wait until the IPO bell rings to enter the secondary market.

From the perspective of capital efficiency, this is inherently an inefficient structure: on one side, unicorn valuations continue to rise, while ordinary investors are kept outside the high walls. A natural question then arises:

Since blockchain can lower the entry barriers for U.S. stocks and achieve asset fragmentation, can it also allow users to share the valuation growth dividends of unicorn assets during the transition from private equity to IPO through tokenization before they go public?

2. Route Game: Perpetual Contracts or Tokenized Mirrors?

The on-chain attempts for Pre-IPO have currently diverged into two distinctly different paths.

One is the perpetual contract model represented by Hyperliquid. For example, based on the HIP-3 framework, developers can customize and deploy perpetual contract products for Pre-IPO assets like OpenAI and SpaceX. The core logic is to combine Pre-IPO with perpetual contracts, not involving actual equity delivery, essentially bypassing the equity itself and only providing price exposure, allowing users to bet on the valuation fluctuations of companies like SpaceX and OpenAI.

The advantages are also evident, such as extremely low entry barriers, no need for accredited investor certification; transactions are completed instantly, without involving complex equity delivery processes, etc.

In fact, at the mechanism level, we can simply understand it as a bet agreement regarding the valuations of unicorns like SpaceX. Liquidity is activated by market makers and leverage mechanisms, and because of this, it is essential to constantly monitor whether the oracle is stable, whether the risk control mechanism is reliable, and whether liquidation is fair in extreme market conditions.

Moreover, from a compliance perspective, whether this model constitutes a disguised securities issuance remains in a gray area in major global jurisdictions.

The other path is much more challenging, which is to allow users to actually hold tokenized equity assets, rather than just trading prices, under compliance.

Robinhood's European trial in June 2025 and MSX's launch of the Pre-IPO section in March 2026 both point in this direction—both platforms have successively reached strategic cooperation with the U.S. compliant asset tokenization platform Republic, aiming to tokenize real Pre-IPO equity through an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) structure, allowing investors to hold legally protected equity shares.

The core value of this model lies in the tokens corresponding to real existing equity, held by a regulated third-party custodian, providing a legal and asset support foundation.

Specifically, Republic adopts an "SPV indirect holding" structure, establishing an offshore SPV to hold the underlying company shares, and then tokenizing the SPV's equity to distribute to investors. Although it is still an indirect holding, compared to pure derivatives, this model at least establishes a traceability chain of "token → SPV → equity."

Of course, the implementation of this model heavily relies on compliance infrastructure, which must operate under regulatory frameworks like the U.S. SEC and collaborate with licensed custodians (such as BitGo Trust Company) to ensure asset safety and legal validity. This also means that it is not just product innovation, but a systemic project.

Overall, these two paths represent two entirely different value orientations. The former (perpetual contracts) is closer to the efficiency logic of DeFi, pursuing extreme liquidity and low thresholds, at the cost of lacking real connection to the underlying assets; the latter (tokenized equity mirrors) is more aligned with the institutional logic of TradFi, with the difficulty lying in building the compliance framework.

But regardless of which path is chosen, a consensus is forming: by tokenizing unlisted equity, a "primary-and-a-half market" is taking shape, situated between primary and secondary.

3. From Robinhood to MSX, the Global Bridge of the "Primary-and-a-Half Market"

The explosion of a market requires not only grand narratives but also, more critically, entry-level products.

From a technical perspective, tokenization technology has undergone years of engineering validation, with smart contracts, oracles, and on-chain compliance frameworks capable of supporting complex financial products; from an application perspective, DeFi and TradFi have completed initial integration, and global users are increasingly accustomed to sharing the most scarce growth dividends of quality assets in a decentralized, permissionless manner.

It can be said that the on-chainization of Pre-IPO assets is at a historical juncture, just a step away. However, pure DeFi protocols often struggle to independently accomplish user education, compliance integration, and large-scale capital introduction. Therefore, at this moment, on-chain infrastructure that can connect with traditional financial genes often becomes the most critical variable between narrative and implementation.

Looking back, Robinhood's attempt in June 2025 is of profound significance.

As a global benchmark for internet retail brokerage, it allows European users to participate in on-chain share trading of star unicorns like OpenAI and SpaceX with extremely low thresholds. This can be seen as the first time a mainstream brokerage has clearly indicated its stance towards the on-chain Pre-IPO market at such a scale, validating that the regulatory framework can be flexibly adapted and proving that there is real and strong demand from the general public for such products.

However, Europe is just the beginning. The larger and faster-growing Asia-Pacific market also harbors significant incremental space, and here, there is still a need for a truly entry-level platform.

This is precisely why the newly launched Pre-IPO section of MSX is worth paying attention to.

On March 2, MSX partnered with Republic, which initially supported Robinhood's European compliance framework, replicating this validated path in the Asia-Pacific market: the first batch has opened tokenized equity subscriptions for top unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, Lambda Labs, and Cerebras Systems, with a minimum threshold of only 10 USDT.

In a sense, MSX is playing the role of an "Asian version of Robinhood"—connecting the scarce equity "before the bell rings" with global liquidity "after the bell rings" using a compliant tokenized structure in the relatively complex regulatory framework of the Asia-Pacific market, bridging the "last mile" that was originally the hardest to cross.

From a broader perspective, the on-chainization of Pre-IPO is never just a one-sided demand from ordinary users; it is essentially a two-way endeavor:

• Ordinary users need a truly equitable entry point to share the growth dividends of the world's top unicorns before the bell rings, rather than waiting outside the secondary market;
• Private equity and early shareholders also yearn to introduce an unprecedented global incremental capital pool, exchanging on-chain liquidity for diverse exit options for their holdings;

The demands from both ends resonate perfectly.

Thus, from Robinhood to MSX, one in Europe and one in Asia, it indeed indicates that the Pre-IPO market is gradually transitioning from the primitive form of "point-to-point matching" to the tokenized era of "low thresholds and high efficiency."

4. In Conclusion

The maturity and widespread adoption of underlying technology do not immediately translate into product explosions, but when enough accumulation occurs, the delayed wave of innovation may come even stronger.

In this sense, the on-chain Pre-IPO becoming a mainstream asset class in the next 3 to 5 years is not without basis: blockchain technology has reached a point where tokenization infrastructure possesses the engineering capability to support complex financial products, the on-chain compliance framework is gradually becoming clearer, and bilateral trust between institutions and users is slowly but steadily being established.

However, the establishment of logic does not equate to a natural breakthrough.

Whether the compliance path is clear enough, whether the risk control mechanism is truly reliable, and whether bilateral liquidity between institutions and retail investors can be effectively matched—each of these is a necessary condition, and none can be missing. More importantly, it is not just Robinhood and MSX that are needed; more platforms must be willing to bear the cost of being the "first to eat the crab," paving a replicable path with real products and real users.

In 2026, whether the on-chainization of Pre-IPO will be a fleeting conceptual game or the true starting point for reshaping the rules of capital market access, we will soon find out.