Few Trusted Venues for Private Secondaries

The market only gets meaningfully liquid when trading consolidates into a small number of trusted venues. Private secondaries are still fragmented across brokers, issuer tenders, and platform workflows, so price discovery is weak and fees stay high. The practical candidates for those few venues are marketplace platforms like EquityZen and Forge for smaller blocks, and issuer centric systems like Nasdaq Private Market and Carta for controlled tenders and cap table updates.

• EquityZen and Forge were built to absorb smaller employee and investor blocks that would otherwise be too messy for banks or large funds. They reduce cap table sprawl with fund structures or other wrappers, which makes them useful for steady day to day liquidity rather than only large one off tenders.
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• Nasdaq Private Market and Carta solve a different problem. They give the company control over who buys, how much sells, and how the ledger updates. That makes them better for structured liquidity programs, but slower and more administrative than open marketplace models.
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• Three or four winners matters because private markets are still network businesses. More buyers and sellers in one venue means tighter pricing, better data, and less broker toll taking. The public market analogy is fewer exchanges with deeper books, not hundreds of isolated bilateral deals.
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The next phase is a stack where a few execution venues sit on top of shared infrastructure for cap tables, transfer workflows, and SPVs. As volume concentrates, private shares start to look less like occasional favors and more like an asset class with regular pricing, recurring liquidity windows, and lower friction for employees, funds, and issuers.