Crypto’s Ownership Economy Must Be Democratized

• Crypto investing is evolving beyond VC dominance, with new platforms offering fairer access to early-stage tokens for retail investors.
• Emerging marketplaces enable transparent, liquid trading of traditionally illiquid assets.
• This shift signals the rise of a new economic layer, democratizing digital asset investing and redefining how value is created and distributed.

The cryptocurrency and wider web3 industries are some of the fastest-growing in the world.

Despite being viewed as somewhat of a fad by traditional finance in its early days, we now have the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, running over $57 billion in a spot Bitcoin ETF.

And of course, BlackRock is not the only institution getting involved in crypto now that its huge value is being increasingly recognised. 

However, crypto does, admittedly, still have a few problems, and one of the biggest is the way that token launches are typically dominated by Venture Capitalists (VCs) that have somewhat skewed the game.

Token Launches

In a typical token launch, VCs will have had the opportunity to buy at rock-bottom prices and then, when the token launches, will immediately offload their holdings to lock in huge profits.

This sends the price of the token plunging, putting retail investors who invest at launch at a significant disadvantage. Subsequently, they may not see a return on their investment for months, if not years.

Early-Stage Investment for Everyone 

According to Murad, whose talk on the subject at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore last year went viral, the answer to this VC racket is memecoins.

Launched on a shoestring by anyone with a computer, memecoins are immune to VC-induced price cliffs, and so they offer retail investors, so the argument goes, the only way to get in on the ground floor of a crypto token. 

There is certainly a great deal of truth in the above argument, and memecoins, specifically, have attracted hordes of retail investors this cycle. However, the market should not be split like this.

Investors of all kinds should be able to invest in projects they believe in from the earliest stages and be able to generate wealth as VCs do. 

Thankfully, as is often the case in this innovative sector, there is now a solution to this problem as we see a number of platforms and marketplaces emerging that are allowing any type of investor to get involved in early-stage and illiquid projects. 

These new marketplaces are redefining how assets, especially crypto assets, are priced, discovered, and traded from inception through every stage of their lifecycle. 

Better Valuations and Efficient Price Discovery 

Not only do these models represent a fairer and more equal ground for funding early-stage companies, but they are also more efficient at a market level.

Newer marketplaces will lead to global price discovery, continuous liquidity and align incentives between communities and builders. They also remove the skewed valuations that lead to steep valuation cliffs between primary and secondary markets.

There are myriad benefits for the projects and companies using marketplaces like these, including smooth, market-driven valuations that enhance trust and credibility, as well as truly engaged and invested communities that believe in the project, rather than a collection of voracious speculators.

The flexibility these platforms offer to tokenize and trade unvested or illiquid assets is a true innovation.

Through projects like these, it will be possible to build a tokenized market between unvested and vested shares, both pre- and post-TGE, and unlock liquidity in what were traditionally non-tradable positions. 

Ultimately, these marketplaces are turning opaque, illiquid assets into tradable, programmable financial products. And for the crypto industry especially, the significance of this capability cannot be overstated. 

New Economic Layer for Project Lifecycles 

In a market where making real returns requires either large amounts of capital or sheer luck, these types of projects are offering a level of transparency previously unseen.

Indeed, if these platforms and tokens proliferated, we would move toward a fully democratized, global market for digital assets.

This infrastructure also has myriad applications. The same mechanisms that can be used to fairly price a pre-TGE token can also price unvested OpenAI equity or rare collectibles.

The possibilities for any number of assets are truly endless and all on a public, immutable, and transparent blockchain. 

With fair markets, liquid valuations, and true global investor participation, we could see genuine freedom of trading and pricing power.

Rather than simply a new way to raise early-stage capital or trade tokens, this model has the potential to evolve into a new economic layer for asset lifecycle management.

In doing so, it’s giving investors of all kinds the keys to alpha: fair access, fair value, and fair opportunity.