Atish Davda, CEO of EquityZen, on the biggest bottleneck in the secondary markets

After years of a frozen IPO market, Figma’s blockbuster July public offering is putting late-stage private companies back in the spotlight.

We reached out to Atish Davda, EquityZen’s CEO and founder, to catch up on the state of the secondary and where the biggest bottlenecks in the market are today.

Key points from our conversation via Sacra AI:

You started EquityZen back in 2013, just after the eruption of secondary market activity around pre-IPO Facebook. What was the original insight behind the company, and how has the vision evolved since then?

It's funny to use the word eruption. I've never thought of that visual before, but in a way, the secondary market and all the trading that occurred in Facebook stock—this is back in 2011—forced Facebook to go public right back then. The JOBS Act hadn't fully been formalized. The shareholder count was still limited for private companies, and Facebook got arm-twisted into going public because so many folks were buying and selling Facebook stock. Now, when I say folks, I mean institutions. Goldman Sachs was doing a lot of this trading. SecondMarket was doing this trading back in the day, and obviously, since then, a lot has happened.

But that kind of blew up. Candidly, the secondary market—there was a big freeze on secondaries. Companies shut things down. Part of it was exactly what I said, shareholder count limitations. The other part of it was that some other brokers out there were cutting the issuers, the companies, out of the loop. They weren't giving them a seat at the table. It was buyer-seller through a transfer notice. The company might want to say, "Hey, look, I'm in the middle of fundraising. Can you not set precedent with transactions right now? I'm happy to be a partner." But those brokers were just lobbing these transfer notices in regardless of the company's interests.

So, all the companies started saying, "All right, well, we're a private company, we'll just shut down secondaries." That's what happened in 2011-2012. EquityZen was formed officially in 2013. I'd been working on it for a few months prior to that.

EquityZen really helped jumpstart a bit of the secondary markets' revival. One of the big successes and insights we had was that we need to give companies a seat at the table. If we don't give companies a seat at the table, then they can perfectly within their rights, legally, just block and prohibit secondary transactions. So, that was a key insight.

The origin story for EquityZen is a bit more personal and not so initially oriented around a market study. This wasn't like an MBA analysis. Initially, I started my career at a quant fund. I left to go start a job at an early tech company. I was a first employee there. My stock in that company and a few others that I had done some consulting for ended up being worth something to me. I wanted to sell at that time, like $35,000 to $50,000 worth of shares to buy an engagement ring for my girlfriend. We wanted to buy a house together. We were wedding planning. All of that stuff's expensive. I wasn't getting paid the hedge fund salary anymore, and so that really was the kernel of what eventually became EquityZen.

If I had $15 million of stock to sell, no problem. Investment bankers would have helped me, lawyers would have helped me. It would have made sense to pay those folks, but because I only had, quote unquote, only $50,000 worth of shares, it was a life-changing amount for me. But not enough for a banker, an accountant, or a lawyer to get involved. That is fundamentally the problem that, in many ways, EquityZen is still mission-oriented trying to solve, which is bringing the solutions that are available to institutions and making them available to the accredited investor, to the individual in a way that's reliable and responsible.

Obviously a lot's happened from 2013 to 2025. But the world looked pretty different back then. Secondaries were taboo and slowly—it was the dawn of a new era.

How have the private markets evolved over the last 12 years since you founded EquityZen?

Secondaries are way more embraced by companies than ever before. Roughly, if you think about it in the following way, just to give some sense of magnitude, 95% of companies were against secondaries twelve years ago, and that figure is closer to 10% now. So it's almost flipped entirely. It used to be 90/10, and it's 10/90 now. In terms of companies that see the value in and are embracing secondaries, there are a couple of reasons for that.

One is that there are solutions like EquityZen and tender platforms and other solutions available to companies that weren't mature twelve years ago. The other reason is even if the companies say no, what we found is that people just went around the company. So if the company closes its doors, people will just go around the back and operate in the shadows. They were trading these forward contracts. By the way, some peers in the space still do this. EquityZen is very staunchly against that, but it's one of the key things I want to call out because simply saying no from a legal standpoint did not stop folks from exchanging risk. It was just happening in an unsafe way.

The analogy I like to use internally is, if the pharmacy closes down, that's not going to stop people from getting whatever drugs they're looking for.

That's exactly the type of thing that started happening. And so we worked with a lot of issuers. EquityZen is on the cap table of over 450 issuers. One of the ways that we've gotten on these cap tables is by hearing them out and learning. "Well, look, if it's going to happen anyway, we're going to take a position. We're going to apply some controls, but we don't want to embrace the whole thing because our business is over here. We sell widgets. We're not in the business of trading stock. It just so happens that this is our ownership structure. We have to take it very seriously."

So that issuer transition is a key change in the last ten years. Another key change is the IPO market. Companies obviously have continued to stay private longer. In fact, that age has continued to grow. That only amplifies the need for a secondary solution, for there to be some sort of opportunity for liquidity that isn't simply tied to a full exit. That trend has continued, and that has almost increased the pressure for there to be some sort of release valve for that liquidity.

Then the third important element of this is education. EquityZen tries to do its part, but there are many resources now available for folks to understand what private placements are from an investor standpoint, what the risks are, how different it is from public markets, but from a seller's standpoint. So not only from the buyer's standpoint, but from a seller's standpoint, what does it mean that I have options? Can I sell this? Wow, that's interesting. How can I sell this? What paperwork do I need? What's a reasonable price for this?

In the last twelve years, a lot of transparency has shown up in the market. We're still in, I don't know, inning four, five. We have many more innings to go in terms of greater transparency, more standardization, and just the maturation of the industry. But in the last twelve years, certainly, EquityZen has tried to play a role in facilitating access to this market in an educated and responsible way by working with the issuers, providing more education and recognizing that the need for companies to provide liquidity is only going to grow as these companies stay private longer.

What's the mix of your customer base today—family offices, smaller accredited investors, institutions—and how has that shifted over the last couple of years?

Our client base is roughly one-third in terms of activity institutional, two-thirds individual. So, these are accredited investors, they're qualified purchasers, and smaller family offices on the individual side. Then, about one-third of the activities come from the institutional folks. It's certainly the case that we see many more individuals come onto the platform than we used to two, three, four years ago.

What's been very interesting for us is that a lot of institutions and, in fact, institutions as a percentage of the activity on our platform have been growing. One of the reasons for that is that institutions are finding themselves in an interesting spot. If you think about a typical VC, I'm not talking about the Sequoias and the Benchmarks and the rest of that world, but I'm talking about the 95% of the other asset managers that are focused on venture capital. I'm talking about the have-nots of venture capital. Not the five megafunds, but everyone else.

They are realizing that if they don't conduct GP secondaries, if they don't themselves sell their position in a company, it's hard for them to deliver liquidity to their LPs. So, you have all these institutional investors realizing, well, shoot, it's not just a problem for the employees, the board members, and the management team of the individual companies. Even one layer above at the ownership level, as a venture capitalist, I need to return capital to LPs.

All of that was fine until 2021. But then beginning 2022-23-24, as the IPO market had dried up, a lot of institutional investors, not only those who used to be buyers or on the sideline of the secondary markets, became participants as sellers on the secondary market because they realized what it's like not to have money to pay off a loan or buy the engagement ring, buy a house, or their version of it, which is to deliver capital to LPs, recycle the capital so that they can reinvest in the next fund and what have you.

In some ways, a lot of these smaller venture funds felt the pain of the everyday shareholder of these private companies. Sure enough, the secondary markets have now been an important avenue, candidly, for these GPs to get liquidity.

Just one last thing to tie into something you mentioned before. One of the key changes EquityZen has tried to make available in the space is our issuer alignment, which is one of the key things we've realized. Some of the innovations we've brought to the market, like Express Deals, are familiar to you.

Just for the folks listening, the idea is we get on the cap table of a company in the same way that, say, Fidelity might get on the cap table of a public company. Then, we're a street name on the company's cap table, which is to say we are the shareholders of record for the company. The company deals with us. We are a responsive, long-term, patient, and friendly shareholder to the company.

Then, in exchange, the company trusts us to say, "Okay, we know that you are the shareholder of record for us. You can manage who owns the piece of the block of shares that we have given to you. You can manage that because we know that you're going to do your KYC, you're going to be regulatorily sound, you're going to manage all the customer communications."

In some way, we've found that to be a real value-add to a lot of issuers because to them, they would much rather have all these accredited investors be real believers in their company, be evangelists for their company, and participate in the upside. It's more of a logistical problem than it is a philosophical one. EquityZen has found a solution to the logistical problem, which is why we've seen the embrace over the last twelve years through some of the innovations we've put in, like Express deals and getting on the cap table of the issuers.

EquityZen has quietly built one of the strongest consumer brands in secondaries. When you see people from outside tech talking about buying private stock, it's almost always through EquityZen. Why is that retail affinity important and what does it unlock for EquityZen?

It's a great question. It's funny, the EquityZen subreddit. It's actually one of the oldest ones in the space. I was blown away. I remember doing an AMA with Reddit in 2014, and that was really one of the first times I started becoming a user of Reddit. It was phenomenal to see this community that, for a very long time, was boxed out of something, and they wanted to get in. This is not the rank and file. This is not the everyday investor. These are the early adopters, the folks who are doing the research. They're self-directed, they want to get it. They had no access, and so we're really grateful and humbled that this community exists.

We are very much all in. Our mission from the get-go is our strategy, our competitive positioning. It's all based around empowering the little guy and gal who has the sophistication and is legally able to participate, but due to market forces, is prevented from participating. This is true not only on the buy side but on the sell side. So that remains our North Star.

What we've realized is that has allowed us to do the following. Retail focus, meaning smaller trades. You cannot do that unless you have an army of people or you build technology. So, EquityZen was the first platform really to build, at this point twelve years in, technology that end to end conducts these private placement transactions that are not just buy and sell the way it would be on AngelList, as an example. But there are three-party transactions. You have a buyer, you have a seller, and you have the issuer whose blessing you have to get, and you have to do all this in a way that the regulators are okay with.

So, we have this technology-based access. You have a retail focus, accredited retail. Smaller trades—you standardize via technology, the more you build technology. Once you can do it for a $20,000 transaction, the technology might actually be able to manage a $200,000 transaction or a $10,000 transaction, so investment minimums have come down, which continues this virtuous cycle, allowing more and more of the suitable population to participate.

That has remained our North Star, that remains something that we are committed to. And candidly, we're a fairly mission-oriented company. So that's going to continue.

Now, what happened about eight to nine years ago is not that much of a surprise. Imagine the principal at a VC fund who works at a VC firm. They are making their own investments through the EquityZen platform. At some point, they realize, "Well, shoot, my fund actually would like to buy this."

So, our clients started asking, "Hey, my employer would actually be a fit for this. Do you have any solution for institutions?" Initially, that was not our priority. But again, at this point, over eight years, we've developed an institutional business. Really, we've been pulled into it by our own clients saying, "Hey, my employer would like to do this." Or, "I have a good friend who is an institution. They didn't know you guys existed, but I introduced you to them. Do you have an institutional solution?"

That's where we have begun to really see, as I was saying earlier, an uptick on the institutional side. Eight to nine years ago, seven years ago, six years ago, it was on the buy side, and now we're beginning to see institutions participate on the sell side. We are fairly committed—EquityZen is committed to continue to deliver buy and sell access to the sub-institutional category as well, not only to the institutional category.

That will remain a consistent theme moving forward, and candidly, our mission statement is to build private markets for the public, and most of the public is individuals, not institutions.

There's been a lot of talk recently about tokenized private stock—Robinhood, Republic, PreStocks. What do you make of this trend? Do you see tokenized private stock being a reality and for what kinds of use cases?

Look, it's a fair question. I don't know the details about each of the different ones you described. I know some of them are using Reg CF, I know some of them are trying to do it using Reg A. We do Reg D—these are all different ways of trying to get to the same place, but with very different constraints. The way I think about it: it's like the New Jersey Turnpike. You have the truck roads and lanes, and you have the car-only lanes. Then, you have a Reg CF, which is like a bicycle lane, or something like that.

The reality is, EquityZen remains on the sidelines in terms of tokenization as it relates to private companies. A big reason for us is that we're still in the early days of the experiment with EquityZen and takes the responsibility of touching clients' money very seriously. As I like to tell my team, we're going to be innovative in a lot of ways. We're not going to be avant-garde with the regulatory side of things when we're touching people's money. We're touching their nest eggs. We do not want to be the ones that have to give them the unfortunate news that we were playing fast and loose and we were moving fast and breaking things.

To answer your question, though, look, we obviously think about this a lot. We think it's roughly in alignment with our mission. The key difference is we want to make sure we do it in a responsible way. I'm not saying they're not being responsible. I'm just not sure that the jury's out yet.

So I get the argument. The everyday investor, even a non-accredited investor, even if they're sophisticated, they're legally not allowed. So if the everyday investor is allowed to put money into a random cryptocurrency or make speculative bets that are on gambling platforms, prediction markets, and what have you, why not let them invest in some of the top names, some of the most innovative names, some of the most wealth creation that's taking place in private markets? I get the argument, very sympathetic to that.

The challenge with tokenization and making it so freely tradable is that it's a bit like saying, "I'm going to go 80 miles an hour in a 55-zone in a hovercraft." Just because I'm not actually touching the highway, the speed limit doesn't apply to me. That's what this tokenization approach is like to me. Which is a big reason why, even though Robinhood has come out and done something along these lines, they've remained in the EU and haven't touched the US because it's pretty crystal clear that even if there's not explicit rules around this, it's the inference that it's not really eligible at this time.

I'm not saying the use case doesn't exist. I'm not saying that it shouldn't exist. What I'm saying is that the current iteration has very strong shortfalls. Until there's more regulatory clarity, EquityZen does not see itself entering the space, especially because we have 800,000 households on our platform almost, and they trust us with their money. And we are not going to take a stance with their money.

What we think the best thing that's come out of this tokenization stuff in the last few months is it's just got the debate going, and that's probably the best part that we can point to. It's like, okay, great people are having a conversation about this. We're at least hearing from people who, even though they are actually more sophisticated and are more knowledgeable about the investments they'd like to make than some of the legally eligible ones, they are legally ineligible to do it.

That is probably the thing that we're most excited about.

Do you see a future where prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket intersect with secondary markets? E.g., could EquityZen itself ever host event contracts tied to private-company milestones—think "Stripe IPO by Q4 2025"—and settle those alongside share trades? What would have to change, legally and operationally, for that to happen?

Look, it's a good question. The way we view prediction markets is this: there's a need for more maturation in the underlying market before a derivative market makes sense. A prediction market essentially is a derivative market of the underlying security. Here’s a hypothetical example. So, it's one thing for us to trade stock in a private company, Ripple. It's another thing for us to trade derivatives on top of Ripple—for us to write options on Ripple. "Hey, I bet Ripple stock's going to hit this level." "I bet Ripple stock is not going to go below this level in this period of time."

I'm not saying that there's never going to be a place for that, but our view on this is that private markets are already complex and opaque. EquityZen strongly believes that we are very much in the category awareness phase of the product life cycle. The early adopters have been doing this for ten years. EquityZen's earliest clients are the early adopters of this cycle. We are in a multi-decade shift. We are only now entering the growth phase. The early majority is coming in. We're not even talking about the folks that tend to lag the rest of the market adoption.

So my point is, category awareness needs to bring standardization, needs to bring transparency. All the things that EquityZen believes that category awareness should come before these derivative markets come in.

Candidly, for the reason you described, I'm not sure how you did on the Peloton trade, but we all read those headlines where there were a lot of people who lost their shirts, and in some cases, more than that because they didn't really know what they were participating in and then they found themselves in a big hole.

That can be problematic. So for that reason, it's not just access, but responsible access, which is what EquityZen really stands for. So it's something that, again, we remain on the sideline of. We think let the equity markets develop, then let the derivative markets develop.

You've always emphasized the importance of issuer alignment. Are you seeing any shift in how companies think about secondaries today—more openness, stricter controls, or something else?

Going back to something we talked about before, when the issuers say no, people still go around. It's just that then the market is just more risky. If you don't have a legitimate way to buy and sell the stock, then the only way you can really trade on it is via a futures contract or a forward contract. Except that in a public market, a futures contract has a clearinghouse, you actually have counterparty risk mitigation. In the private markets, you don’t.

Issuer alignment is absolutely critical for there to be continued growth in this market. Frankly, we are seeing it. There's a lot of openness from issuers generally. Like I said, the 90-10 has flipped to 10-90. 90 percent of the companies are now supportive of secondaries. Look at what's happening in the AI talent wars right now. You have Meta throwing a bunch of money. They're not throwing wads of cash, they're throwing Meta stock at these folks. Meta stock is liquid. It's fully liquid.

If you are an innovative company, you just happen to be private, and you want to compete for that same talent. Well, you better have a solution to rewarding your talent with the same kind of upside and offer them the ability to convert this private restricted stock into liquid currency.

I don't really see the secondary markets going away. More and more companies are realizing that not only is this a thing that's going to happen, but it's actually a perk that they can utilize. I strongly believe there's no market without the issuer. Even the issuers that are publicly denouncing secondaries, they're saying they're against it. The reality is they're just being more selective, and they're exercising a lot more discretion, meaning they value the discretion, they value the privacy.

Candidly, it's a big reason why EquityZen is on the cap table even of these companies that are publicly denouncing other secondary platforms. And a big reason is we've taken the time to earn their trust. We've taken the time to show them that we're not going to jam ourselves through the back door. We're not going to conduct these forward contracts. We're not going to, essentially, foster irresponsible access.

By doing all those things, one of the key things we believe will happen is that the stricter controls may remain, but there's always going to be a clearly defined avenue for access. The more maturation in the market takes place, the more of these "on the periphery" deals are going to go away. We believe that's really going to lead to more standardization, which, like I said, is fantastic. The more standardization there is, the more you can write educational material about it.

A lot of our knowledge center right now has to contemplate 20 different types of ways in which a private stock could be structured. We think that could come down to five. If you have to think about five things, not 20 things, many more people will be able to make educated decisions.

We're marching in that direction. It comes in fits and starts. I'm very bullish that this is exactly where we're heading. Look at the bigger reason why EquityZen continues to lower its minimums. We're doing it very methodically. We brought it down to $5,000. Now we've done a $50 transaction with positive unit economics. The technology doesn't care about the actual number in it.

But do we want to do that right now? No. Because if we brought the minimums down to $50, it might create the education problem. We don't believe that would be a responsible way of providing access. So that's the balance we're striking. We're slowly going to bring minimums down, but we don't want to do it in a way that people find themselves saying, "Well, I didn't know what I was buying."

That's a key thing that we take seriously.

You recently rolled out an integration with Yahoo Finance that pipes EquityZen pricing data into their pages on private companies. How do you think about the strategic goal there?

Totally. Look, Yahoo Finance is probably the first finance portal I had used. This is dating myself, but probably 25 years ago at this point. If you want to talk about category awareness, Yahoo Finance is still actively used by, I believe, 150 million users every month, active users every month. Our mission of providing responsible access, building private markets for the public. Recognizing we're in the category awareness phase of the market development and Yahoo Finance's ethos of empowering the self-directed investor, giving them better access to data, giving them better access to the qualitative aspects of an investment, is exactly the right partnership for us.

So, we're very excited about that. EquityZen helps power their private company pages, especially as the market enters this growth phase. We think it's critical for us to partner with brands that have the credibility in the eyes of the market, that have staying power, that have demonstrated that they are trying to empower many folks out there. And so utilizing those channels rather than always going head-to-head with them is at least EquityZen's approach to a lot of these things. We don't want to compete with Yahoo Finance. Why? I'm not even sure we could compete, but even if we could, why compete? Why not join forces together?

It's like two teachers teaching together can actually be a positive thing if they just game plan on the class beforehand. That's our approach to these.

We're seeing more companies running internal liquidity events—select tenders, company-chosen buyers, scheduled programs. When does that model make sense, and how do you think about what EquityZen's role could be in supporting or enabling those events?

Look, that's certainly something that we have facilitated before. There are several issuers, several companies for whom we have a relationship with the company, a relationship with folks on the board of that company. So, instead of us having to go and find a new buyer for this, we have a standing bid. We have an investor who says, "I got maxed out on my allocation. I only got whatever it is, 12.5%. We'd love to build the position to 15%."

To your point, zooming out for a second, there's a lot more company-sponsored programs taking place. Candidly, EquityZen is usually supportive of these ultimately because we're supportive of more liquidity in private companies.

Our portfolio of a little over 450 companies. Sometimes we're a buyer in these programs, sometimes we're a seller in these programs. The company-sponsored programs are these distinct events. They take place in these discrete time periods. EquityZen's solution is for the time periods in between those distinct time periods.

What we've seen is the most forward-thinking companies that we work with use both tenders and platform secondaries on EquityZen as complementary tools. They use that to deliver continuous liquidity to their shareholders, but also controlled liquidity to their shareholders. That's the direction in which more and more companies are eventually going to go. Secondary transactions alone, we don't think, are the only way to operate. I think tenders alone are not the only way to operate.

Sometimes, you want to charter a plane if you want to fly 300 people to the same destination and you want to control everything. Sometimes, you want to fly commercially. EquityZen flies commercially. We take a lot of pride in what we offer, and we are very cognizant that there's a complement to what we offer that has a place in the marketplace.

Let's talk about the end state. If everything goes right over the next 5 years, what is EquityZen and how is the world different for private shareholders and investors?

Look, it's a good question. I will just preempt this and say that I've stopped making predictions in five-year increments after the pandemic.

But I'll tell you what our vision is, and as of now, it sounds like we're very much marching down that path. Individual investors remain our North Star. Institutional coverage and institutional investors, especially asset managers, is very much a growing segment for us.

What we're realizing is there's real synergy between the individuals and institutions. In the public equities market, what we saw was these programmatic trading desks showing up, and with the programmatic trading desk, the key value they started adding was it wasn't just a matter of matching a $15 million block here with a $15 million block there. They started matching a $15 million block here with a $5 million block and then a whole bunch of million-dollar blocks or a whole bunch of $100,000 blocks.

Right there is where we have seen EquityZen being able to provide value. We have this North Star of individual investors, and actually, an even better way to serve them is not just matching them with other individuals but by matching institutions to individuals and individuals to institutions.

So we check all four of the boxes, and that is where we see ourselves continuing to go in the next five years. That's one.

The second one is that we've actually been an asset manager at EquityZen for about eleven years. It's just a less known part of our business we call EquityZen as a company-friendly shareholder. We hold stock until IPO. Our portfolio is 450 companies. We have over 200 companies from our own asset management business that we're going to be holders of. We really believe in them. We're going to hold through the IPO. EquityZen as an asset manager is growing.

So that's probably the direction in which we're going to go in the next five years. Those two things, we are seeing not only a lot of appetite for it from the market but a lot of confidence that it is adjacent to our core competencies. At the same time, the time has come for us to lean into those.

What are the biggest bottlenecks to unlocking more liquidity? Is it cap table friction, company willingness, seller supply, or something else? And what do you see as the most important unlock in the next few years?

It's a great question. And it's funny. Folks who are unfamiliar with operating one of these will sometimes think that it's a technical problem. And the reality is it's not a product problem. It's a people problem. Here's what I mean. The key challenge right now in the market where if we got rid of this problem, we would have a lot more liquidity is that there are too many intermediaries, gatekeepers who are monetizing their relationships and trying to make a quick buck, but holding the liquidity hostage until they make their buck.

Market forces, as they always have, will resolve this in time. And until then, you have these dynamics that artificially inflate price, artificially slow down a deal. As we know in any marketplace, you need agreement on price, you need agreement on size and you need agreement on time. And when you have two of these three things being hindered by folks wanting to rent-seek essentially, you're going to have an impact on liquidity.

In public markets, back in the day, they suffered from too many active managers. There were so many hedge funds. They were all competing with each other. It was hard for someone who wanted to allocate capital to figure out who was a real hedge fund and who was essentially gambling and got lucky once.

Similarly, we have a lot of intermediaries right now who, instead of facilitating the liquidity process rapidly, are actually gatekeeping and saying, hey, I'm not going to tell you to go get this block of investment directly. But you put your money in my SPV. I will launch an SPV. I will then make the investment and I'm going to carry... I'm going to keep some of the money for me.

Do I blame them for doing that? No, I get their interest in doing that. The problem is that some of them are doing it illegally without having a broker-dealer. Some of these intermediaries are very explicitly just gatekeeping to monetize, and that artificially inflates the price.

I'm actually a big believer in this. All this capital, all this extra, all these extra pennies, all these tolls that are being collected by the intermediaries. The fact that someone's willing to pay the higher price for the stock tells you that the money should go in the pockets of the shareholders of that company. Instead, it's going in the pockets of all these intermediaries.

So, your question was, "What would unblock or remove the bottleneck to liquidity in private markets?" I would say, get rid of intermediaries. Pick three or four solutions that are going to provide secondary markets. If you funnel all activity through them and remove this concept of intermediaries, liquidity would start to spike and, candidly, would bring transparency, standardization, knowledge, all the things that we've seen as important elements of market maturation.

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