Carta as market infrastructure
Carta and the future of liquidity
The real strategic choice is whether Carta should be the market maker or the market infrastructure. The evidence points to infrastructure. Carta’s cap table system and transfer agent role let it keep the official ledger, move shares, calculate tax and holding period data, and reduce admin work for issuers. But brokering trades creates direct trust conflicts with the companies whose records it controls, especially in a market where most volume still happens through off platform, broker led deals rather than company run programs.
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Carta’s advantage is vertical data and workflow. Because the company already holds the cap table, it can invite eligible sellers, reconcile ownership after a transaction, handle share transfer, and use cap table history to simplify tax and compliance. That makes Carta better at being the plumbing than at being the salesperson.
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The market itself is still structurally messy. Prior research shows issuer controlled tenders are slower and more bespoke, while brokers and marketplaces handle much of the ad hoc volume because sellers want liquidity on their own timing. More recent interviews describe fragmentation and intermediaries as the main bottleneck, which supports a model where Carta powers others rather than tries to own every trade.
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There is a clear public market analogue here. Transfer agents and record keepers like Computershare or Broadridge sit underneath the market, while brokers, exchanges, and liquidity providers sit on top. The panel frames private markets as still being built in that same order, with the system of record coming before a true exchange layer.
Going forward, the likely winning shape of the market is a hub and spoke model. Carta becomes the trusted source of truth for ownership, permissions, and settlement, while brokers, marketplaces, and newer products like lending or derivatives plug into that record system. If that happens, private liquidity gets easier without forcing the system of record to compromise the trust that makes the whole stack possible.