Jonathan Shaffer
3 min read
The world's most valuable startups aren't traded on public markets. They're tucked away in private portfolios — locked behind high capital requirements, long lockups and limited access to deal flow. Historically, private markets have belonged to the elite few: endowments, family offices and a small club of well-connected institutional players.
Today's private markets remain largely gated. Traditional private equity requires minimum investments of $250,000 - $25 million, venture capital funds often demand more than $1 million minimums and accredited investor requirements shut out the majority of Americans who don't meet these wealth thresholds.
But that exclusivity is beginning to crack.
Thanks to blockchain technology, we're witnessing the early formation of a parallel financial system — one that brings transparency, liquidity and accessibility to a space that’s been notoriously opaque and illiquid. Tokenization is re-architecting private markets from the ground up, and the implications are enormous.
At its core, tokenization transforms real-world assets, such as shares in growth-stage startups or private funds, into programmable, digital tokens. These aren’t just digital wrappers. They carry embedded compliance and can be structured to provide fractional exposure to a broad range of investors without price distortions.
Imagine accessing a basket of high-growth, venture-backed companies through a single, liquid and blockchain-native asset. Investors no longer have to wait 7–10 years for a potential exit. Secondary markets and liquidity protocols now make it possible to trade positions or rebalance portfolios more dynamically and at fairer prices than ever before in private markets.
Some of these tokenized vehicles go further. They embed governance rights or performance-linked incentives. Others offer exposure to hard-to-access assets: pre-IPO unicorns, private credit or even private equity and VC funds. In many ways, this resembles the opportunities that ETFs introduced in the 1990s — except this time, it's powered by open networks and smart contracts.
And this shift isn't just about efficiency. It's about equal access. Tokenization opens the door for smaller investors, global participants and underserved geographies to allocate capital into previously gated markets. Venture capital, long the engine of modern innovation, is no longer the sole domain of Silicon Valley insiders or sovereign wealth funds.
As the infrastructure matures from compliant issuance platforms to regulated secondary markets, we're inching closer to a financial world where access to private market upside is no longer a privilege, but a programmable right. This isn't a theoretical future. It's already happening, with tokenized funds, startup equity and yield-bearing private debt instruments actively trading across decentralized and centralized platforms alike. The total secondary market transaction volume surged to record highs of over $150 billion in 2024, nearly triple the amount from just seven years ago; yet, these markets still represent only about 1% of total private market value, signaling massive room for growth.
