Financial markets have a habit of manufacturing shortcuts. In 2026, that shortcut has a name: pre-IPO tokens. These are digital assets that promise exposure to the value of private companies that are not yet listed on a public exchange — SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic — without requiring the purchase of a share. The proposition is appealing and the timing supports it.
Several of the world’s largest private companies are approaching their public debuts, and crypto platforms have responded with speed. However, the fact that an instrument is available does not mean it is suitable. I believe these tokens raise more questions than they answer, and that many investors are buying them without fully understanding what they are holding.
Exposure is not ownership: the synthetic nature of pre-IPO tokens
To begin, it is worth being precise about what is actually acquired. A pre-IPO token is not a share, nor a deposit certificate, nor a regulated derivative under market supervision. In almost every case, it is a product issued by a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that synthetically replicates the expected price movement of the company once it goes public. The holder has no voting rights, receives no dividends, and does not appear on any corporate register.
The position depends entirely on the solvency of the issuer and the legal structure that supports the token. This, which might seem a minor detail in a footnote, completely defines the risk profile of the product.
The gap between exposure and ownership becomes even more visible when a single company is represented by several different tokens. SpaceX is the clearest example. After confidentially filing for its initial public offering (IPO) in April of this year, with a reported valuation around $1.75 trillion, the market received at least three different instruments.
Bitget launched preSPAX together with Republic on the Solana network; PreStocks placed its own SPACEX token on various platforms; and BingX opened a perpetual futures contract under the ticker VNTL. All three refer to the same economic event but operate with distinct mechanisms: a subscription pool, an SPV with underlying exposure, and a leveraged derivative.
Fragmentation, liquidity, and risk: the market’s structural weaknesses
For an investor seeking a direct position, this fragmentation complicates comparisons and dilutes liquidity. This is not a secondary matter: the price dispersion among tokens that should move similarly introduces market noise that benefits short-term speculators and penalizes those who wish to hold an informed position.
Artificial intelligence companies have also entered this circuit. Anthropic, valued at around $61.5 billion in its latest private funding rounds, and OpenAI, which is analyzing a potential listing toward the end of the year, both have tokens issued by platforms such as PreStocks and accessible through Web3 wallets. The architecture is similar: synthetic economic exposure, with no equity participation. Here, an additional factor emerges that other sectors do not share. Both OpenAI and Anthropic can, at any moment, distance themselves from these products with a statement.
A single public announcement clarifying that the company does not endorse the token would erode market confidence and cause liquidity to contract. This is not a theoretical risk; it is a reputational risk that depends on corporate decisions entirely outside the token holder’s control. On top of that, most of these instruments explicitly exclude U.S. investors, which shows the caution with which issuers operate in regulatory margins.
IPO Genie represents a different case. Here one is not betting on a specific company, but on the utility of a token within a platform that aims to filter and distribute investment opportunities in private rounds. The $IPO token is in its presale phase, with a total supply of 437 billion units and a 50% allocation to the community.
The contracts have been audited by CertiK and SolidProof, which provides a minimum of technical verification, but does not eliminate the uncertainties inherent to any early-stage project. Real liquidity will not exist until the token is listed on a secondary market, and its value will depend on the team’s ability to access attractive deals and transfer part of that exposure to holders. Investing here means betting on the execution of an intermediation model, not on the performance of an underlying company. Those are risks of an entirely different nature.
Other tokens, such as those referencing Anduril, Stripe, Databricks, or Neuralink, share several characteristics worth attention. They tend to have modest capitalizations within the crypto ecosystem, shallow order books, and trading volumes that do not always reflect the relevance of the companies they point to. Anduril, for example, is a defense technology firm valued at $60 billion, yet its token moves marginal volumes.
This gap between the real valuation of the company and the liquidity of the instrument indicates that the token’s price can deviate significantly from any fundamental metric, driven more by the mood of the crypto market than by the progress of the business.
What all these instruments share is a set of risks worth listing clearly. The first is the absence of ownership rights: whoever buys the token does not become a shareholder and acquires no corporate protections whatsoever. The second is the market fragmentation I have already mentioned, which generates price discrepancies and makes an orderly exit difficult.
The third is regulatory and counterparty risk: the token issuer may suspend operations, suffer a solvency problem, or be affected by a supervisory measure, and the investor has no direct access to the reference asset.
The fourth is the low market depth, which amplifies transaction costs for even modestly sized positions. And the fifth is valuation decoupling: the implicit price assigned by the token may not match the price of the last private funding round, and that difference is often fueled by expectations that are difficult to verify.
None of this turns pre-IPO tokens into a fraud. The platforms that offer them are responding to genuine demand for early access to high-growth companies. What happens is that the friction between the promise of democratization and the operational reality produces an uncomfortable mismatch. An investor operating on a centralized exchange may come to think they are doing something similar to buying a technology stock, when in reality they are assuming structural risks and liquidity risks specific to an unregulated market that still lacks common standards.
I think the case of these tokens serves to illustrate a broader phenomenon. Each time a financial instrument oversimplifies the nature of a complex asset, the risk does not disappear; it moves to places where the investor is not looking. And in 2026, with trillions of dollars of private value about to go public, the temptation to confuse exposure with ownership is stronger than usual.
My reading is that these tokens may make sense for those who operate with full information, accept their synthetic nature, and are willing to bear the issuer risk. For the generalist investor who simply wants direct participation in a company, the product, as things stand today, resembles a mirage more than a real window.
