Continuous Price Discovery in Pre-IPO Markets
Xavier Ekkel, founder of PreStocks, on 24/7 tokenized pre-IPO stock
The important shift is that private stocks start behaving less like locked collectibles and more like tradable financial assets. Once a market supports not just buying and selling, but also borrowing and shorting, prices stop being set only by the most bullish buyer in a slow bilateral deal. They start reflecting a wider mix of views, faster, with more continuous feedback from traders, employees, funds, and new buyers.
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Private secondaries have historically been thin, manual, and slow, with deals often taking weeks or months to close and prices coming from isolated negotiations or periodic tenders. That makes the observed price stale and noisy, not a live market clearing price.
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Shorting matters because it adds the missing negative side of the order book. In a long only market, skeptics can mostly stay out. In a market with lending and shorting, they can express a view directly, which usually tightens spreads and makes prices harder to overinflate.
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The constraint is not only product design, it is market structure. Issuer controls, SPV complexity, fragmented intermediaries, and regulation still limit who can trade and how often. That is why platforms like EquityZen and Monark are focused first on standardization, distribution, and custody before full derivatives like shorts become mainstream.
If this develops fully, private market platforms will look more like miniature public markets around the best late stage companies. The winners will be the firms that combine broad distribution, compliant market plumbing, and enough liquidity to support not just access, but continuous repricing, financing, and eventually two sided trading around private company risk.