💸 Circle Hires IPO Bankers, Could File Next Month. USDC issuer Circle is finally getting close to publicly filing for its IPO.
👨 Trump Family Enters Bitcoin Mining With 'American Bitcoin' Venture. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are partnering with Hut 8 to bring the family into the BTC mining business.
🟠 Saylor's Strategy Buys Nearly $2B in Bitcoin in Latest Buy. Michael Saylor's firm bought more than 22,000 BTC this past week at an average purchase price of $86,969 per coin.
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Daily Market Snapshot: Ethereum fought to stay above $1,800 on Monday as the asset ended a brutal Q1 of 2025 with prices down 45% since the start of the year. This contrasts with BTC's 11% decline in the same time period.
“Right now it's hard to invest in OpenAI or SpaceX as a private company. And I think crypto can help solve that. If you tokenize private companies, it'll be good for the companies and also for investors. It's crazy to me that you can't invest in companies like SpaceX and OpenAI.”
– Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood
The public markets aren’t what they used to be.
An increasing number of companies are choosing to stay private for longer, rather than go public on the stock market.
Some of the world's biggest companies—the ones that will define our collective future—are not available on the public stock market. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic… even Stripe, which was founded in 2010, are still private companies.
Yet, despite the fact that these companies are not public, the equity in these companies still trades hands in the private markets. SpaceX, Stripe, and other private companies will frequently conduct ‘tender offers,’ allowing stakeholders to sell shares to pre-arranged investors. It is not unheard of for someone motivated in your sphere to have been able to gain access to SpaceX equity this way—we have an employee at Bankless who somehow got his hands on a little bit of ownership of SpaceX.
Despite being private, the markets for private equity still exist.
The biggest reason that prevents the majority of companies from going public is the $1–3M of upfront expenses and ~$2M of yearly ongoing costs to maintain compliance on the public market. This financial burden is the hurdle that many companies fail to get over.
Bankless Nation, in my recent conversation with Vlad Tenev, he spoke about the idea of a tokenized form of SpaceX, or OpenAI, or many of the other private companies that are working to change how humanity operates. OpenAI is already disrupting every field of work imaginable (check out this twitter thread I found yesterday about how one developer replaced months of architect labor), and SpaceX is already delivering first-world quality internet access to the entire planet.
Simply as a heuristic—if the company is changing the face of humanity, I think it would be a nice thing to own. And if the companies are choosing to not go public, then maybe tokenization can offer the opportunity of ownership to those motivated to seek it.
There’s still a lot left to color in here. Not all CEOs want their company public. Compliance costs are here for a reason. We’ll need some rules and regulations to ensure orderly tokenized equity markets.
But the pieces to create tokenized equity markets all already exist. Maybe once all the institutions are done playing with stablecoins, they can point their focus to something a little more ambitious—like a compliant equity tokenization process.
Then, Vlad can list those tokens on Robinhood, and the average individual can access ownership of the world’s most disruptive companies.
Unlock the power of Unichain – a fast, decentralized Ethereum Layer 2 network built to be the home for DeFi and cross-chain liquidity. To bridge tokens to Unichain and start swapping today, get started with Uniswap Labs’ web app or mobile wallet.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev returns to Bankless for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of tokenization, crypto regulation, and his company's ever-evolving product suite.
Vlad lays out a bold vision for bringing tokenized assets like SpaceX and OpenAI equity to retail investors, discusses the role of prediction markets as “truth machines,” and introduces Robinhood's latest products: Strategies, Cortex, and Banking. This episode is a big glimpse into where TradFi and DeFi collide.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
