Can’t Own SpaceX Or OpenAI? Tokenization Could Be The Next Best Thing.

In the 1980s, startups raced to ring the bell. In the 2010s, they raced to stay private. Today, they’re racing to tokenize and that shift could decide who gets into the next era of wealth creation, and who is left watching from the sidelines.

For decades, the IPO marked the moment a company “made it” from the passage from private innovation to public participation. Then cheap money and deep private markets changed the script. From 2012 to 2022, global private‑equity assets under management more than tripled to over $13.4 trillion, concentrating enormous financial clout in illiquid private companies.

That evolution has created a stark access gap. On one side: institutions and insiders with allocations into late‑stage giants like SpaceX and OpenAI. On the other: everyday investors locked out of the growth curve until much later, if ever. Private‑equity markets now run into the tens of trillions globally, yet only a tiny sliver is accessible via tokenized products, underscoring how early this market still is.

Some builders are now trying to turn that access gap itself into an index: a single instrument tied to a basket of late‑stage private tech companies worth more than $100 billion each. One emerging idea is to treat these giants as an indexable category, bundling exposure to several of them into a single tokenized product; Hecto Finance is one of the more aggressive experiments in that direction, testing a pre‑launch index built around a small set of these so‑called “Hectocorns.”

“We used to talk about unicorns, then decacorns,” says CEO Ultan Miller. “Now we’re in a world of $100 billion private companies and most people still can’t participate in their value.”

Just as FAANG stocks once symbolized the dominance of public tech equities, a new informal club is taking shape behind the scenes. Call them the Hectocorns, OpenAI, SpaceX, ByteDance, Stripe, xAI and Anthropic, all privately held firms that have surpassed or are widely reported to be approaching $100 billion valuations without going public.

“Founders today don’t need to go public to scale. They can raise tens of billions privately while maintaining control,” says Miller. “For many, public markets are no longer where you go to grow; they’re where you go to exit.”

That inversion, public markets as endgame, not launchpad, is what Hecto is trying to price into a single instrument. Rather than betting on one name, the project aims to build a diversified, tokenized index that captures exposure to top private firms before they list.

The Quiet Tokenization Wave

Hecto’s strategy doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. Across the industry, a quiet tokenization wave is already reshaping how investors access private markets.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has publicly described tokenization as “the next generation for markets,” and the first wave has largely centered on real‑world assets like Treasuries, credit and real estate, where fractional ownership structures pair blockchain rails with regulated wrappers.

On the private‑equity side, companies like Securitize have partnered with managers including KKR, BlackRock, Apollo and Hamilton Lane to tokenize interests in private funds, presenting tokenization as a way to “democratize capital markets by making them more accessible, transparent and efficient.” Its launch of tokenized feeder structures for flagship strategies marked some of the earliest large‑scale institutional tokenization efforts in private markets.

In Singapore, ADDX CEO Oi‑Yee Choo has argued that tokenisation can “democratise access to private investments” by cutting minimum tickets from around $1 million to as low as roughly $5,000 equivalent and automating issuance, custody and secondary trading for accredited investors across more than 30 jurisdictions.

Ondo Finance, which focuses on tokenized securities like Treasuries, has framed tokenized assets as part of a broader “transformation for financial assets.” In a public letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October last year, it urged regulators to adopt a “same activity, same risk, same regulatory outcome” framework rather than treat tokenized assets as a separate category, a stance that helped validate tokenized Treasuries and credit as viable on‑chain products as the SEC closed a probe into the project.

Other regions are taking a similar approach, with the recently announced amendments from South Korea’s National Assembly to the Capital Markets Act and the Electronic Securities Act, Singapore regulating tokenized assets under the Securities and Futures Act (SFA), Hong Kong integrating tokenization into its traditional securities framework under the Securities and Futures Ordinance (SFO) and Japan regulating tokenized securities under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA).

While Hecto targets the high‑risk, high‑reward world of pre‑IPO giants, this infrastructure layer has already reached operational scale. Securitize runs a regulated stack of tokenized funds with blue‑chip partners; ADDX serves accredited investors across Asia; and Ondo has obtained U.S. registrations as it builds a network for tokenized Treasuries and securities. Together, they show that compliant, liquid tokenized securities can work, so far with mostly bonds, credit and diversified funds. The leap to late‑stage private equity introduces harder questions about cap tables, transfer restrictions and what it really means to “own” a pre‑IPO share onchain.

Despite real‑world assets totaling approximately $18–34 billion on‑chain in 2025, tokenized private‑equity exposure remains a tiny fraction of a multi‑trillion‑dollar PE market—underscoring how early experiments like Hecto still are. Analysts now routinely project tokenized assets could reach $2–4 trillion by 2030 in base‑case scenarios, with more aggressive estimates ranging much higher depending on regulation and infrastructure.

The Case for Access — and the Caveats

The upside is obvious: tokenization could unlock global access to an asset class historically reserved for pension funds, elite venture firms, family offices and sovereign wealth funds. Trillions of dollars in private markets sit structurally out of reach for ordinary investors; whoever cracks compliant, liquid exposure to late‑stage private equity will help redraw the line between “Wall Street” and everyone else.

But the risks are real. Pre‑IPO equity is illiquid, often highly concentrated, and legally complex. Tokenized exposure must grapple with custody, compliance and settlement—plus the reality that many jurisdictions still lack clear rules for secondary trading of security tokens. And if a structure fails, the question of who truly holds the bag: token holder, intermediary or issuer, remains largely untested in court.

Miller argues that’s precisely why the infrastructure needs to be designed with regulation in mind, not added later.

“We’re not just building for crypto‑native investors. We’re building for a future where a 23‑year‑old in Jakarta can access the same pre‑IPO exposure as a fund manager in Zurich,” he says. “But we only get there by embedding compliance into every layer—tech, legal, operational.”

To that end, Hecto plans to publish cryptographic proof of reserves and is exploring dual issuance under both VARA and a major European regulator to support cross‑border distribution.

A Generational Shift in What Gets Indexed

Beyond the plumbing, Hecto is tapping into a broader cultural shift. For much of the 20th century, innovation was measured by public stock tickers. Today, many of the companies shaping AI, fintech, space and digital infrastructure are years, or decades, from IPO.

“Each generation has its defining asset class,” says Miller. “In the 80s it was equities. In the 2000s, tech IPOs. In the 2010s, crypto. The 2020s could be defined by tokenized pre‑IPO access—where value is created before it’s public, and ownership starts earlier.”

Hecto Finance remains early‑stage, with a waitlist of over 25k people. No token has launched, no assets are held on‑chain, and the company has not yet disclosed its cap table or full go‑to‑market roadmap. Still, its early entry into the tokenized‑equity space reflects a broader momentum that Forbes and others have begun to track as private‑equity giants experiment with tokenized funds and secondary liquidity.

Whether Hecto or another player gets there first, the direction of travel is clear: more of the growth curve is happening off‑exchange, and investors, and regulators, are searching for a way in. If it works, Hecto won’t just give investors a new way into the next generation of great companies. It may blur the line between “private” and “public” so thoroughly that, by the time a ticker finally appears on screen, most of the real action will already have happened.

The Pre‑IPO Tokenization Landscape, by the Numbers

• Global unicorns: more than 1,600 companies, with estimates of roughly $5–6 trillion in aggregate value.

• Top 100 unicorns: around $2.9 trillion combined, driven heavily by AI and software.

• On‑chain RWAs: approximately $18–34 billion in 2025, up nearly tenfold in recent years.

• Tokenized Treasuries and money‑market funds: roughly $7–8 billion by late 2025.

• Tokenized‑asset forecasts: $2–4 trillion by 2030 in base‑case scenarios, with upside in bullish cases.