The race to sell retail investors a piece of the artificial intelligence boom has gone mainstream ¡ª closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles (SPVs). Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth ¡ª ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access.
The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX ¡ª in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage.
Ventuals and PreStocks, two crypto venues riding that shift, have seen their trading activity ¡ª measured by open interest and market value combined ¡ª surge more than threefold since the start of the year to last month. Major crypto exchanges have also begun listing pre-IPO assets, broadening the reach of these instruments to tens of millions of users. Trade.xyz, a crypto derivatives platform on the Hyperliquid blockchain, is also joining in.
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