Prime Brokers Facilitate Large Private Blocks
The Privately-Traded Company: The $225 Billion Market for Pre-IPO Liquidity
Zanbato’s edge is that it sells access to institutional order flow, not just access to private shares. A hedge fund does not usually hunt for a million Stripe shares one seller at a time. It hands the order to its prime broker, the same desk that already handles financing, trading, and custody, and that broker searches ZX’s broker network for a matched block. That setup turns a messy private deal into something closer to institutional block trading, while still routing around issuer restrictions through a services layer when approvals are needed.
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ZX is built for broker dealers, not individual sellers. That matters because large buyers want one negotiated block at one price, with better odds the trade actually closes. Zanbato reported more than $29B of processed orders from 2017 to 2020, across 500 plus issuers, with average order size of $14M, showing where it sits in the market.
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This is a different model from EquityZen and Forge. Those platforms grew by helping employees and smaller holders sell stock, often through funds or structured contracts. Zanbato instead plugs into prime brokers and banks, which is why it is better suited to a hedge fund trying to buy a very large Stripe position in one shot.
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The broker layer exists because private stock still has transfer restrictions, rights of first refusal, and issuer approval issues that make direct exchange style trading hard. Interviews across the market point to too many intermediaries as the main liquidity bottleneck, but they also show why a broker network can still win when the buyer cares most about execution on a large block.
The next stage is a split market. Large institutional blocks will keep flowing through broker and prime broker networks, while smaller transactions get standardized on issuer aligned platforms and tender programs. If private companies keep staying private longer, the winners will be the systems that combine real buyer depth, issuer cooperation, and faster settlement into something that feels more like a true market.