Fractional Continuous Liquidity for Private Stocks
Xavier Ekkel, founder of PreStocks, on 24/7 tokenized pre-IPO stock
The big shift is not putting stocks on a blockchain, it is turning an asset that is mostly inaccessible and manually traded into something that can be bought in small pieces and repriced continuously. In private markets today, deals often run through brokers, SPVs, transfer approvals, and weeks of paperwork. Tokenization keeps the SPV underneath, but moves the investor experience closer to a live market with fractional entry, faster settlement, and reusable on-chain liquidity.
-
Public stocks already have broad access and deep liquidity, so tokenization mostly adds convenience like 24/7 trading and portability. Private stock is different, because many investors cannot buy at all, minimums are high, and traditional secondary transfers can take 3 to 6 months, which is why the access change is much larger on the private side.
-
The real bottleneck in private secondaries is market fragmentation. Supply and demand are split across brokers, SPVs, and issuer controlled programs, which weakens price signals and slows execution. Tokenized formats can help aggregate smaller orders into tradable flow, but only if they solve distribution and not just add another wrapper.
-
This is why the strongest comparison is less with tokenized public equities and more with the long effort to digitize private market plumbing. Carta, Nasdaq Private Market, EquityZen, and Monark all attack the same pain points, issuer approval, cap table handling, investor onboarding, and settlement. PreStocks pushes that logic further by making the position itself programmable and continuously tradable.
The market is heading toward a hybrid model where private shares behave more like public instruments without forcing companies fully into public market disclosure. The winners will be the platforms that combine compliant packaging of the underlying asset with enough distribution to create real trading activity, because better liquidity and price discovery make private stock more useful to employees, funds, and eventually mainstream brokerage users.