How Blockchain Could Lower the Cost of Pre-IPO Investing

Getting into companies like SpaceX or OpenAI before they go public has usually taken at least $100,000, accredited investor status, and months of paperwork. Chan Ahn, founder of Tessera, is working on a different path. Tessera puts exposure to those private companies on the blockchain, so anyone with a crypto wallet can trade it starting from $1.

In this episode, I talked with Chan Ahn, who started Tessera last year. He spent almost 20 years in investment banking, including work on private markets, and then about five years immersed in crypto and blockchain. One note first. This episode and this post are for education only and are not financial advice. Talk to your own financial advisor before you make any investment decisions.

Chan started with how buying into a private company works today. Buying a public stock in an app feels instant. With a private company, you need a broker to find someone on the other side. Then come lawyers, due diligence documents, and a wire transfer. Chan said the process takes about two to three months, and you can pay up to 10% of what you buy in fees. You also usually need at least $100,000 and have to qualify as an accredited investor, which means meeting a wealth or income bar.

He said that bar is there on purpose. Private markets don't have the investor protections public markets have, so they were set up for big, experienced investors. He pointed to two main problems. One is settlement risk, since you have to trust brokers and wait to confirm the deal. The other is disclosure, because private companies often don't publish the reports public companies do. For large, late-stage companies like SpaceX, he said there's enough public information to understand the business. Blockchain handles the settlement side, and that's how Tessera can offer trading from $1, around the clock, subject to its terms and conditions, including which country you're in.

I asked Chan to explain blockchain for someone who has never used a wallet. A blockchain is a chain of blocks, and each block holds a series of transactions in order. His example made it click for me. Say he's in Singapore and I'm in Texas, and we want to trade. If he sends his side first, he might wait a week and worry that I'll run off. So we hire a broker we both trust, that broker may need insurance, and every layer adds cost. On a blockchain, the trade is all or nothing. His side only goes through if mine does at the same moment. He called that atomicity, and it's why a trade can settle in a split second without a middleman.

This matters to Chan because he lived through the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008. He said the crisis came from intermediation. Banks carried credit risk on each other, and when people got scared, everyone wanted their money back at once. In his view, money has always run on trust, and blockchain removes the need for that trust when two parties exchange value. He thinks it could be as disruptive as the internet but slower to arrive, since it involves money.

We also compared Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Chan said Bitcoin's limited uses are what make it solid. Ethereum is slower but more decentralized, and most stablecoins sit there. Solana is the fastest of the three and suits trading, which is why Tessera issues its assets on it. He expects the differences to matter less over time, the same way nobody thinks about the old CDMA, TDMA, and GSM phone networks anymore. It reminded me of a recent episode where we talked about how many companies own the lines behind a phone call, and nobody notices.

The part that surprised me most was Chan's view on regulation. It was the first time I'd heard someone from this space defend it. He said people don't really trust banks. They trust the regulation behind them, like licensing and deposit protection. Once regulation arrives for blockchain, he expects licensed fintechs and brokers to bring it to everyone else. In his words, "if you want your pie to get bigger, you have to have regulation in place." He was also upfront that a regulatory framework for tokenized private assets doesn't exist yet, and that creating a crypto wallet can still feel daunting.

I also asked how a buyer knows the assets are real. Tessera holds the exposure through Cayman Islands special purpose vehicles, a traditional legal structure that ring-fences the risk. It then works with Chainlink, an oracle, which is a data provider that brings outside information onto the blockchain. Chainlink reports how much exposure the vehicle holds, and buyers can see on the blockchain how many tokens reference it, one to one. Chan was clear that the tokens and the shares aren't the same thing. In Tessera's case, the link is a loan participation. He called this verification the minimum step and said it's still evolving.

My takeaway is the same advice Chan gave newcomers. Explore, but be cautious. This is still early technology, and a lot of it is unregulated, so understand the risks first. And again, this post is for education only and isn't financial advice. Talk to your own financial advisor before you invest in anything. You can learn more about Tessera at tessera.pe.