Opening up unicorn opportunities: From Robinhood to MSX, an on-chain experiment of pre-IPO equality.

Written by: Frank

Since 2026, there seem to be no new battles for RWA.

Looking back over the past five years, from stablecoins to US Treasury bonds, and then to funds and US stocks, mainstream assets have been successively introduced into the on-chain system and tokenized into new tradable financial products, which has to some extent enabled the on-chain trading logic of TradFi secondary market assets.

However, the primary market, the place where super unicorns like SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic reside, remains closed. Users can smoothly trade Tesla on the blockchain, but it's difficult to buy a "ticket" to SpaceX before the bell-ringing ceremony.

However, since last year, the boundaries have indeed been tested: Robinhood is testing private equity tokenization products such as OpenAI in Europe, Hyperliquid has launched perpetual contracts such as SpaceX, and this week MSX launched on-chain pre-IPO share issuance for unicorns such as SpaceX and ByteDance.

Although these actions take different paths, they all point in the same direction: Pre-IPO, the previously highly closed primary market, is trying to embrace blockchain.

I. Pre-IPO: Embracing On-Chain

To understand the significance of Onchain for Pre-IPO, it is necessary to first clarify the unique role that "Pre-IPO" plays in the life cycle of the capital market.

For a long time, the investment myths we are familiar with, such as Masayoshi Son's decision to invest in Alibaba in 6 minutes, a16z's early investment in Meta (Facebook), and Sequoia Capital's bet on Coinbase, are essentially telling the same story: before high-quality assets are IPOed, institutional investors position themselves in advance to capture the "scissors difference" in valuations from private to public markets.

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 before Facebook emerged. Before and after betting on Alibaba, Masayoshi Son missed out on or mis-invested in countless internet companies. In the end, bearing extremely high trial-and-error costs, enduring exit cycles of up to ten years, and finally covering overall losses with the excess returns of a few successful projects is the basic business logic of venture capital, and also the "risk premium" that institutional capital should receive.

However, the logic changes drastically when we talk about Pre-IPO (the period leading up to an IPO).

Because this is a completely different stage, as the "last mile" before listing, the company has grown into a super unicorn like SpaceX, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic, with an extremely mature business model and a clear revenue path. Entering the market at this time carries significantly lower risk compared to early-stage venture capital, and even possesses a certain certainty similar to that of the secondary market.

What's ironic is that in this highly certain phase, the returns before and after the IPO are often still astonishing. Take two representative stocks in 2025 as examples: Figma's IPO price was $33, and it closed at $115.5 on the first day, an increase of more than 250%. Bullish's first-day increase was also close to 290%.

This means that those institutions that secured their shares before the bell-ringing ceremony still managed to grab the most lucrative piece of the pie, despite the extremely low risk involved.

Unfortunately, even with secondary trading platforms for unlisted company equity such as Forge and EquityZen, they generally adopt a peer-to-peer OTC matching model, with minimum investment thresholds often reaching tens of thousands of US dollars, and are only open to qualified investors. Ordinary users can only take over in the secondary market after the IPO bell rings.

From a capital efficiency perspective, this is inherently an inefficient structure. On one hand, unicorn valuations continue to climb, while on the other hand, ordinary investors are kept out by high walls. A natural question then arises:

Since blockchain can lower the entry barrier for US stocks and achieve asset fragmentation, can it also allow users to share in the valuation growth dividends of companies transitioning from private placement to IPO through tokenization before unicorn assets are listed?

II. The Game of Strategies: Perpetual Contracts or Tokenized Mirrors?

The on-chain attempts at pre-IPO have diverged into two logically different paths.

One model is the perpetual contract model, exemplified by Hyperliquid. For instance, based on the HIP-3 framework, developers can customize and deploy perpetual contract products for pre-IPO assets such as OpenAI and SpaceX. The core logic is to combine pre-IPO assets with perpetual contracts, without involving actual equity transfer. Essentially, it bypasses the equity itself, only providing price exposure, allowing users to bet on the valuation fluctuations of companies like SpaceX and OpenAI.

The advantages are also obvious, such as extremely low entry barriers, no need to pass qualified investor certification; transactions are completed instantly, without involving complicated equity transfer procedures, etc.

In terms of mechanism, we can simply understand it as a betting agreement on the valuation of unicorns such as SpaceX. Liquidity is activated by market makers and leverage mechanisms. For this reason, it is necessary to pay close attention to whether the oracle is stable, whether the risk control mechanism is reliable, and whether the liquidation is fair under extreme market conditions.

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

The other path is much more difficult: allowing users to actually hold tokenized equity assets, rather than just trading prices, while adhering to compliance requirements.

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

The core value of this model lies in the fact that the tokens correspond to real equity held by a regulated third-party custodian, which has a legal and asset-backed foundation.

Specifically, Republic adopted an "SPV indirect holding" structure, which holds shares of the underlying company by setting up an offshore SPV, and then tokenizes the SPV's equity and distributes it 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 is highly dependent on compliance infrastructure. It must operate under the regulatory framework of the U.S. SEC and cooperate with licensed custody institutions (such as BitGo Trust Company) to ensure asset security and legal validity. This also means that it is not only a product innovation, but also an institutional project.

Overall, these two paths represent two completely different value orientations. The former (perpetual contracts) is closer to the efficiency logic of DeFi, pursuing ultimate liquidity and low barriers to entry, at the cost of a lack of real connection with the underlying assets; the latter (tokenized equity mirroring) is closer to the institutional logic of TradeFi, but the difficulty lies in building a compliance framework.

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

III. From Robinhood to MSX: A Global Bridge to the "Premium Market"

The explosion of a market requires not only a grand narrative, but more importantly, an entry-level product.

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

It can be said that the on-chain transformation of pre-IPO assets is at a historical juncture, just one step away from completion. However, simple DeFi protocols often struggle to independently complete user education, compliance integration, and the introduction of large-scale funds. Therefore, on-chain infrastructure that can connect with traditional financial genes often becomes the most critical variable between narrative and implementation.

Therefore, looking back, Robinhood's attempt in June 2025 was of profound significance.

As a global benchmark for online retail brokerages, it supports European users to participate in on-chain share trading of star unicorns such as OpenAI and SpaceX with extremely low barriers to entry. This can be considered the first time that a mainstream brokerage has taken such a large-scale and clear stance to demonstrate its position on the on-chain pre-IPO market. This verifies that the regulatory framework can be flexibly adapted and also proves that the general public has a real and strong demand for this type of product.

But Europe is just the beginning. The Asia-Pacific market, with its larger size and faster growth rate, also holds significant potential for growth, but what it lacks is a truly meaningful entry-level platform.

This is precisely why MSX's newly launched Pre-IPO zone is worth paying attention to.

On March 2, MSX partnered with Republic, the company that initially supported Robinhood's European compliance framework, to replicate this proven approach in the Asia-Pacific market: the first batch of tokenized equity subscriptions for top unicorns such as SpaceX, ByteDance, Lambda Labs, and Cerebras Systems has been opened, with a minimum threshold of only 10 USDT.

To some extent, MSX is playing the role of an "Asian version of Robinhood"—connecting the scarce equity "before the IPO" with global liquidity "after the IPO" through a compliant tokenized structure in the relatively complex regulatory framework of the Asia-Pacific market, thus bridging the "last mile" that was originally the most difficult to cross.

From a broader perspective, the on-chain transformation of pre-IPO projects is never just a one-sided demand from ordinary users; it is essentially a two-way process.

• Ordinary users need a truly equal access point to share in the growth dividends of the world's top unicorns before the IPO, instead of having to wait outside the secondary market.
• Private equity firms and early-stage shareholders are also eager to introduce an unprecedented global incremental capital pool to exchange on-chain liquidity for diversified exit options for their holdings;

The needs of both sides were met, and they quickly reached an agreement.

Therefore, the shift from Robinhood to MSX, one in Europe and one in Asia, indeed demonstrates that the pre-IPO market is gradually moving from its original "peer-to-peer matching" model into a "low-threshold, high-efficiency" tokenized era.

IV. In Conclusion

The maturity and widespread adoption of underlying technologies often do not immediately translate into a surge in products, but when enough is accumulated, the delayed wave of innovation can be even more powerful.

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

However, just because the logic holds true does not mean that a solution will naturally occur.

Whether the compliance path is clear enough, whether the risk control mechanism is truly reliable, and whether the liquidity between institutions and retail investors can be effectively matched are all necessary conditions that cannot be omitted. More importantly, it is not just Robinhood and MSX that need more platforms willing to bear the cost of being the "first to try" and use real products and real users to pave a replicable path.

Whether the on-chain transformation of pre-IPOs in 2026 will be a fleeting concept or the true starting point for reshaping capital market access rules, we will soon find out.