Tokenizing and automating pre-IPO trades

The real opportunity is not just cheaper access to private shares, it is turning a brokered transaction into software. In the current market, a seller, a buyer, a broker, lawyers, compliance teams, and often the issuer all touch the trade, which is why deals can take weeks and carry bespoke fees and paperwork. PreStocks is trying to compress that stack into a programmable token and a standardized wrapper around SPV exposure.

• Traditional secondaries still run like an over the counter market. Brokers find supply by calling holders, negotiate price by hand, then coordinate approvals and settlement. Multiple interviews describe today’s bottleneck as too many intermediaries and too much off platform coordination, not a lack of buyer interest.
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• What automation changes first is the retail sized trade. EquityZen explains that making smaller transactions work required building end to end software for a three party process, buyer, seller, and issuer. That is the same core shift PreStocks is pointing at, replacing people pushing documents with software that standardizes eligibility, order matching, and recordkeeping.
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• The harder part is that private shares still live inside issuer rules, SPVs, and cap table systems. Monark argues the long run market will still need centralized custody, clearing, reporting, and investor limits, while Carta era discussions show trust with issuers and systems of record is what determines whether liquidity becomes institutionalized or stays informal.
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The next phase is a split market. Front end trading, pricing, and investor access will look more like a modern brokerage app, while the back end will still be won by whoever turns private market settlement, approvals, and custody into reliable infrastructure. The winner will be the platform that hides the manual work without losing issuer trust or regulatory control.