SpaceX and Tech Giants Are Staying Private for Longer. Could Tokenization Help?

Something quietly broke in the financial system — and most people didn’t even notice.

And yet, it's impossible to miss if you look at SpaceX potentially coming to market at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

“Something's changed over the years,” Ultan Miller, CEO of Hecto Finance, told Coinage. “And something that not many people have realized it's been a slow creeping effect… companies have been staying private for longer.”

The shift has been subtle, but the consequences are massive. The biggest winners of the last decade — the companies defining AI, space, and the next generation of tech — are no longer being built slowly in public markets everyone can access. They’re staying private longer, growing larger, and concentrating value in fewer hands.

“The consequence has been that the everyday investor has not shared in that value creation story,” Miller said.

For an industry like crypto that built its identity on democratizing access, that reality cuts deep. Because while Bitcoin opened access to money, the next frontier may be access to ownership — or at least something close to it.

“There are over 1500 unicorns worth… somewhere between 4 and $5 trillion,” Miller said. And even that understates the moment. The market has already moved beyond unicorns.

“Back when I first got into industry… a private company worth $1 billion… was almost unheard of,” Miller said. "We've evolved from unicorns to decacorns and we're now .... in the era of hectocorns."

Hectocorns — companies worth more than $100 billion — are no longer hypothetical. They’re the new gatekeepers of wealth creation. And unlike previous cycles, the public isn’t getting in early — or sometimes at all.

“If it is going to take all our jobs, at least let us ride the upsides,” Miller joked.

That tension sits at the center of what Hecto Finance is building. Not a replacement for equity markets, but a workaround. A way to give investors exposure to private companies without needing to be in the room where deals get done.

And just like for many tokenization projects, that is a bit of a work in progress in figuring out the right mix of meeting investors where they are. Early experiments have had stumbles. Last year, Robinhood advertised that they had tokenized shares of OpenAI on Arbitrum. OpenAI later pushed back on that noting that it was something closer to a tokenized option on shares controlled by another party.

Many experiments like Hecto are operating in a new in-between, testing if investors are fine accepting financial upside without the voting rights that may come with traditional equities. It’s a subtle but important distinction — and one that reflects how finance is already evolving.

"Just because you hold an ETF doesn't mean you own shares and have voting rights in all of the individual companies," Miller said. “That's probably good enough for most people ... they just want the financial exposure.”

What is new, however, is the scale of demand — and what happens when that demand finally finds a release valve.

“There is such insatiable demand for access to this asset class,” Miller said.

We’ve already seen glimpses of it. In public markets, vehicles offering indirect exposure to private tech have traded at massive premiums — sometimes multiples above their underlying value. Not because the assets are mispriced, but because access is.

Destiny Tech100 and the Fundrise Innovation Fund (VCX) are two examples of this playing out right now ahead of the SpaceX IPO. They hold shares in private companies before their public listings and as investors rush to get exposure, those shares have traded at massive premiums to the value of the ownership each respective fund actually holds.

“When you do open up access… people are willing to pay well above and beyond the underlying value,” Miller said. That’s where what Hecto is exploring gets interesting. And by playing with tokenization models, the company believes it can start to change the old way of doing things. Instead of letting scarcity drive distortions, Hecto’s model could help match supply and demand with less volatility — using market makers to mint new exposure and keep pricing anchored closer to fundamentals in a less stepwise function.

It’s a different way of thinking about markets — one where value isn't as gate-kept and liquidity unlocks might not be as constrained by traditional structures.

But the real disruption may come later. Because if private market exposure becomes liquid, global, and continuous, it raises a bigger question: What happens to the IPO?

“We're kind of banking on that,” Miller said, when asked whether companies might not need to go public at all.

“Companies have got very comfortable staying private for longer,” Miller said. Tokenization doesn’t just extend that trend — it could complete it. “We're really at the beginning of… a new asset class,” he said.

And like every new asset class, it introduces new tradeoffs. Less control for issuers. More transparency for markets. And a redistribution — however imperfect — of who gets access to the upside.

Crypto has always promised to level the playing field. But for years, that promise has largely been confined to tokens and speculation. Hecto is making a bet on crypto holding on to roots that tokenization won’t just be about creating new assets — but unlocking the ones that were never accessible to everyone in the first place.

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