PreStocks' official website data shows its assets under management (AUM) stands at a mere $22.37 million.
Written by Ma He, Foresight News
On October 19, Pump.fun announced that PreStocks has officially launched on its platform. Users can now directly trade Pre-IPO tokens corresponding to eight companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Neuralink, Figure AI, Kalshi, Polymarket and Oura on Pump.fun.
Following the announcement, the PUMP token saw no significant price volatility, and its price is currently hovering around $0.0044.
Against the backdrop of surging Pre-IPO market interest, why did Pump.fun choose to partner with PreStocks to enter the Pre-IPO space? And are the equity tokens purchased on PreStocks actual stock?
Only Price Exposure Provided, Not Actual Equity Ownership
PreStocks is a Pre-IPO tokenization platform built on the Solana blockchain. The platform acquires underlying unlisted equity in the semi-primary market via special purpose vehicles (SPVs), and mints SPL synthetic assets on the Solana Token-2022 standard that track the corresponding economic exposure.
According to its official documentation, these tokens only provide economic exposure and do not represent actual equity ownership. They do not grant holders voting rights, dividend rights, information rights or any other legal rights, nor are they approved, authorized or endorsed by the corresponding companies. The platform explicitly states that it is not available to users in the United States. There is no minimum transaction amount, and users can buy and sell these tokens on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as Jupiter via a Solana wallet.
PreStocks was formerly known as prePO, founded by Xavier Ekkel in 2021. Ekkel previously worked as a software engineer at Canva. In its early days, prePO operated on other blockchains, and completed multiple rounds of financing with backers including institutions such as Republic Capital.
In August 2025, the project was officially renamed PreStocks and migrated to Solana, before it began issuing tokens tied to specific private companies.
Based on public data, PreStocks' current scale remains relatively limited.
As of October 20, PreStocks' official website data shows its AUM (assets under management) stood at just $22.37 million.
The latest data shows that OpenAI's tokenized assets recorded a trading volume of $6.47 million in the past 24 hours, while Anthropic's tokenized assets only saw $2.92 million in trading volume over the same period. Apart from leading assets such as OpenAI and Anthropic which have a certain level of capital depth, other long-tail assets generally suffer from poor liquidity and high slippage. Their prices are mainly driven by on-chain supply and demand as well as market sentiment, with no anchor price from public markets.
Notably, the core mechanism of this launch not only supports direct buying and selling of these 8 Pre-IPO assets, but also allows users to use these pre-IPO tokens as underlying pricing/liquidity pairing assets to launch new memecoins, for example, launching a memecoin paired with an OpenAI token liquidity pool.
Pump.fun Gains an Additional Revenue Stream
For Pump.fun, this integration has clear commercial logic. As the largest memecoin launch platform on Solana, Pump.fun's revenue mainly comes from fees charged when users launch tokens, as well as trading fees generated from subsequent transactions. The core problem the platform faces is that market narratives are exhausted extremely quickly, so it needs to continuously introduce new, attention-drawing themes to maintain launch volume and trading activity.
Pre-IPO related companies have consistently been at the center of market discussion in recent times, with names like OpenAI and Anthropic frequently appearing in financing, valuation and industry news. Introducing high-attention unicorn pre-IPO assets to PumpSwap as underlying pricing and liquidity pairing assets essentially injects new structured narrative fuel into the platform. Users can launch new tokens around these names, which will drive up related trading volume accordingly, bringing additional trading fee revenue to the platform.
According to Pump.fun data, its DEX trading fee revenue has picked up somewhat, but still lags behind its peak level in 2025.
If it can capitalize on the upcoming Pre-IPO boom, this will undoubtedly have a positive impact on its DEX trading volume and PUMP token buybacks.
To date, the team has bought back and burned 489.74 million PUMP tokens, accounting for 12.276%! (MISSING) of the total supply.
For PreStocks, this is an additional distribution and trading entry point. Even though derivative memecoins incubated via pairing with Pre-IPO assets inevitably face high elimination rates and short lifespans, as long as a portion of trades are executed on Pump.fun, both parties can profit from trading fees.
However, the price of PreStocks tokens is entirely determined by on-chain liquidity and participants' trading behavior, and may experience high volatility.
Some of the companies whose tokens are listed have previously taken a restrictive stance against holding their shares via SPVs, which further increases the uncertainty of these tokens.
In mid-May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI almost simultaneously updated their share transfer policies, explicitly stating that share transfers without written approval from the board of directors are invalid and will not be recognized by the companies. Both companies specifically named methods including transfers via special purpose vehicles (SPVs), tokenization tools and contracts.
Anthropic stated in its announcement: "We do not allow special purpose vehicles to acquire Anthropic shares, and any share transfer to an SPV is invalid under our transfer restrictions." OpenAI issued a similar warning, stating that unapproved transactions may be invalid and may have no economic value for buyers.
This announcement directly impacted the related tokens issued by PreStocks on Solana. According to CoinMarketCap data, the price of Anthropic's token on PreStocks fell from around $1,400 to $842 after the warning was released, a single-day drop of over 26%! (MISSING). OpenAI's token price, meanwhile, plunged from $1,984 to around $890, a decline of approximately 46%! (MISSING).
The sharp price drop triggered solely by official announcements clearly indicates that some investors have major doubts about the "actual legitimacy" of these tokens.
Currently, some investors and traders have turned to other platforms for reasons including liquidity. Hyperliquid and Lighter allow users to take leveraged long or short positions on private company valuations via synthetic perpetual contracts, without needing to hold any underlying equity via SPVs.
These products rely entirely on price oracles and margin mechanisms, with low trading thresholds and high leverage, but they also face forced liquidation risks. Additionally, after companies explicitly restricted share transfers, some related markets have also been shut down or seen liquidity shrink.
For PreStocks, this is a new distribution channel; for Pump.fun, it is a way to turn the currently popular Pre-IPO narrative into fee-generating pairing assets. Whether these newly launched memecoins can truly bring sustained trading volume still depends on the market's acceptance of this type of "price exposure".