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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

Coinbase Launches Pre-IPO Futures and Tokenised Stock Trading

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jun 18
  • 3 min read

The everything exchange now puts a public price on private companies before they list.


Coinbase has done something this week that most founders will feel before they fully notice it. The largest listed cryptoasset exchange in the United States has started trading perpetual futures on the value of private companies, beginning with SpaceX. A founder watching from Bristol or Manchester cannot trade these contracts. That is not the point. The point is that the value of a private company, a number once known only to its board and its backers, is becoming something the public can price in real time. The launch arrived as part of what Coinbase is calling a system update, a push to become an everything exchange. Three pieces matter. The headline piece is the pre-IPO perpetual future. SpaceX trades under the ticker SPCX-PERP. The contract is settled in USDC, has no expiry, runs around the clock, offers up to 5x leverage, and references the company's total equity valuation rather than a guessed per-share price. Anthropic and OpenAI are next in line. Read the small print and the limits are stark. Holders get no ownership, no dividends, no voting rights, and no allocation when the company eventually lists. This is synthetic exposure to a price. Nothing more. The second piece is the one that actually touches equity. Next month Coinbase will offer tokenised US stocks to customers outside the United States, each token backed one to one by the underlying share and carrying full shareholder rights, dividends included. That is real tokenised equity, not a wrapper around a number. The third piece, an AI advisor sitting alongside new stock options, rounds out the everything exchange pitch.

For founders, the catch sits in what these contracts do not carry.


Coinbase has done something this week that most founders will feel before they fully notice it. The largest listed cryptoasset exchange in the United States has started trading perpetual futures on the value of private companies, beginning with SpaceX. A founder watching from Bristol or Manchester cannot trade these contracts. That is not the point. The point is that the value of a private company, a number once known only to its board and its backers, is becoming something the public can price in real time.


The launch arrived as part of what Coinbase is calling a system update, a push to become an everything exchange. Three pieces matter.


  • The headline piece is the pre-IPO perpetual future. SpaceX trades under the ticker SPCX-PERP. The contract is settled in USDC, has no expiry, runs around the clock, offers up to 5x leverage, and references the company's total equity valuation rather than a guessed per-share price. Anthropic and OpenAI are next in line. Read the small print and the limits are stark. Holders get no ownership, no dividends, no voting rights, and no allocation when the company eventually lists. This is synthetic exposure to a price. Nothing more.

  • The second piece is the one that actually touches equity. Next month Coinbase will offer tokenised US stocks to customers outside the United States, each token backed one to one by the underlying share and carrying full shareholder rights, dividends included. That is real tokenised equity, not a wrapper around a number.

  • The third piece, an AI advisor sitting alongside new stock options, rounds out the everything exchange pitch.


So what should a founder who is thinking about tokenising their own business, take from this. Start by separating the synthetic from the real. A pre-IPO perpetual is a wager on a valuation. It moves a price, it does not move a cap table. When SpaceX or OpenAI finally lists, nobody holding SPCX-PERP owns a sliver of the company. The tokenised stocks are the opposite. They are genuine claims, with the rights that make equity equity.


The interesting line runs between the two. For years the tokenised equity story has been about attaching real ownership to a token and letting it move freely. Coinbase has split that story in half and shipped the easier half first. Price discovery for private companies is now happening in public, on a liquid venue, before any listing. The harder half, real onchain shares with rights attached, is being rolled out more cautiously, for non-US customers and for already-public stocks.


For a UK audience the practical reach is limited today. Neither product is available to a British founder or a UK fund in the way it is framed here. Pre-IPO futures also reference companies that are already enormous, SpaceX and OpenAI rather than a seed-stage business in Leeds. A founder raising a first round gains nothing direct from any of this.


The direction of travel is the part worth holding onto. Private company value is becoming observable and tradable, and the machinery to bolt real rights onto a token is being built in the same quarter. Those two trends are converging. When they meet at the smaller end of the market, the question of who gets to price, hold and trade a private company's shares stops being theoretical for everyone, founders included.


Watch three things from here.

  1. Whether regulators treat a valuation-referencing perpetual differently from a tokenised share.

  2. Whether pre-IPO contracts ever reach companies below the mega-cap tier.

  3. And whether the tokenised-stock rails, once proven on public equities, are pointed at private shares next.


Key Takeaways

  • Coinbase has launched USDC-settled pre-IPO perpetual futures, starting with SpaceX, with Anthropic and OpenAI to follow.

  • These futures track a private company's valuation but carry no ownership, dividends, votes or IPO allocation. They are synthetic exposure, not equity.

  • Separately, Coinbase will offer tokenised US stocks to non-US customers next month, backed one to one and carrying full shareholder rights. That is the genuine tokenised-equity step.

  • For UK founders neither product is directly accessible yet, and the futures reference only mega-cap private companies.

  • The signal is convergence: private company value is becoming publicly observable while the rails for real onchain equity rights are built alongside it.

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