JeaJee

The next RWA gold rush might not be tokenized stocks anymore. I think the much bigger opportunity might be in private companies, where access is restricted, liquidity barely exists, and price discovery is still broken. Because buying tokenized NVDA or TSLA doesn't fundamentally give ppl access to a market that didn't exist before. Those stocks already have deep liquidity, market makers, continuous price discovery and billions in daily volume on traditional exchanges. Putting them onchain improves distribution, settlement, accessibility and DeFi composability, but the underlying financial market was already working. Private companies are a completely different problem. 81% of US companies generating over $100M in annual revenue are privately held, down from 87% in Apollo's older 2024 study. That's by company count, not market value, but still a pretty insane amount of economic activity sitting outside public equity markets. And many of the companies investors want exposure to most are exactly the ones they can't easily buy. AI, robotics, defense, space, biotech, cybersecurity… Broad private-market secondary transactions already hit a record $226B in 2025, up 41% YoY. Now look at what @Ondo is actually building. Its Private Markets product starts with exposure to an unnamed pre-IPO AI company, with plans to expand across robotics, defense, space, cybersecurity, energy and other sectors. Ppl aren't buying the underlying shares directly. They're buying a tokenized note whose payout is tied to the value of the private company's common stock at a qualifying liquidity event. 1 note references the liquidity-event value of 1 common share, minus applicable fees and withholding. The token can trade 24/7 among eligible investors, while the underlying company might go months without a meaningful observable transaction. Ondo is trying to create a tradable, transferable financial instrument around economic exposure that was previously difficult to access or trade. Imagine a private AI company valued at $50B in its last funding round. Its tokenized exposure could start trading at an implied $80B valuation because CT gets euphoric, despite nothing fundamentally changing in the company's business. Ondo also plans to support Private Market Notes as collateral on Ondo Perps. Now we're talking about private company exposure becoming usable collateral, with derivatives and liquidations built around an asset that might not have a reliable real-time fundamental price. Pretty fascinating, but also where things can get messy. Stale valuations, thin orderbooks, wide spreads and forced liquidations could create volatility completely disconnected from the underlying private company. So there's a lot of infrastructure that still needs to be built around this, and some projects are already catching on: @Securitize: leads tokenized PE/VC with ~$1.2B across 11 assets, recently brought ARK's $1.3B venture fund with OpenAI/SpaceX exposure onchain. But it's still fund ownership with quarterly redemption gates, not liquid private shares. @KAIO_xyz: ~$141M in tokenized fund assets across BlackRock, Mubadala, Hamilton Lane and others, including ~$65M in private equity. @CtrlAltCo: ~$705M in tokenized PE across 2 Solana litigation-finance vehicles. More onchain asset registry than actual liquid private market. @ColbFinance: ~$97M in tokenized pre-IPO exposure to SpaceX, Anthropic and Revolut, up ~46% in 30d. Big demand for access, but secondary liquidity is still barely there. @PreStocks: ~$44.5M AUM across 7 pre-IPO names, with $545M+ cumulative volume, turning SPV-backed private equity exposure into 24/7 tradable Solana tokens. @joinrepublic: ~$150M in tokenized private-market exposure across 4 assets, mostly SpaceX-linked notes on Solana, giving retail access to pre-IPO names through tokenized debt claims. @JarsyInc: retail pre-IPO exposure with $10 minimums, 1:1 SPV-backed tokens for names like SpaceX, Anthropic and Anduril. Raised $5M but still tiny scale. I'm also starting to think differently about the next wave of RWAs. The first wave largely focused on bringing assets that already had efficient markets onto better financial rails. The next wave could be about building financial markets for assets that never had efficient ones in the first place.