Private-Share Trading Hits Records as Companies Try to Shut It Down

The machine that powers private markets has stalled. The steady rhythm of companies being bought, built, and sold is no longer functioning as designed, Goldman Sachs' top private markets executives told clients in a June briefing, according to a Fortune report. The numbers back up the diagnosis. Secondary trading of private securities set what EquityZen, now part of Morgan Stanley, described as a blistering pace during the first quarter of 2026, with volume records shattered across every major platform, Crowdfund Insider reported, citing the firm's quarterly data. The demand for liquidity has never been higher. The mechanisms for providing it have never been more fragmented.

Three forces are now colliding in ways that will define the next cycle of startup finance. First, retail and institutional appetite for pre-IPO shares has reached a fever pitch, driven by the AI sector's near-total dominance of the venture narrative. Second, the companies themselves, led by Anthropic, are mounting an aggressive legal and administrative campaign to block unauthorized secondary trading. Third, a new class of decentralized infrastructure, built on tokenization and prediction markets, is arriving to route around both the companies and the traditional platforms. The result is a secondary market that is simultaneously booming, fracturing, and being reinvented from the ground up.

The Q1 numbers tell the demand story plainly. EquityZen's report showed that AI companies accounted for a disproportionate share of secondary volume, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI dominating the most-traded lists. Bid-ask spreads on AI names tightened materially as institutional buyers, including sovereign wealth funds and multi-family offices, competed for exposure at almost any price. The median premium to last primary round for top-quartile AI companies traded on secondary platforms crossed 40% during the quarter, a signal that the official fundraising valuations were lagging far behind what the market was willing to pay.

That premium is exactly what makes secondary trading so threatening to the companies themselves. When shares change hands at valuations well above the last primary round, it complicates the next official fundraise. A company that closed a Series D at a $40 billion post-money valuation in January does not want to walk into a Series E in September with secondary prints suggesting the market thinks it is worth $65 billion. The gap invites scrutiny from new lead investors, creates awkward conversations with existing LPs about mark-to-market discipline, and, in the worst case, forces the company to either raise at a valuation it cannot justify or accept a down round that resets the cap table.

The Corporate Counterattack

On May 12, Anthropic published an update to its investor support page that sent a jolt through the secondary ecosystem. The company listed eight platforms that it said were not authorized to facilitate transactions in its shares, TechCrunch reported. The language was unusually aggressive for a private company. The implication was unambiguous: if an investor bought Anthropic shares on one of the named platforms, the company would simply refuse to acknowledge the transfer, effectively rendering the purchase legally invisible from the perspective of the cap table.

Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, offered by these firms is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.Anthropic investor support page, as reported by TechCrunch

The backlash was swift. The secondary platforms pushed back through their legal teams, arguing that right-of-first-refusal provisions in Anthropic's governing documents did not extend to an outright ban on transfers, and that the company's public warning constituted tortious interference with lawful commerce. By the end of May, Anthropic had revised its guidance, narrowing the list from eight firms to four, The Information reported. The climbdown was partial but revealing. Even the most valuable private AI company in the world could not fully shut the secondary window. It could only try to narrow the aperture.

The Anthropic episode exposed a deeper structural problem. Private companies have always had tools to restrict secondary trading: rights of first refusal, board consent requirements, transfer restrictions written into charter documents. But those tools were designed for an era when secondary trading was an occasional, bespoke affair involving a handful of early employees exercising options. They were not built for a world in which Forge Global, EquityZen, and a dozen smaller platforms run continuous, algorithmically priced order books in pre-IPO names, and in which retail traders can gain synthetic exposure through crypto-based derivatives.

The Liquidity Drain

Then came SpaceX. The company's June 12 Nasdaq debut, raising $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, was the largest IPO in history by a wide margin, SpaceNews reported. The sheer scale of the offering had consequences that rippled well beyond the equity markets. CoinDesk warned in April that the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPOs together could absorb a significant share of risk-on capital, pulling liquidity out of crypto markets and into public equities. The prediction proved prescient: Bitcoin slid roughly 8% in the week leading up to the SpaceX listing as traders repositioned.

Dawn Fitzpatrick, CEO of Soros Fund Management, flagged a related dynamic in her 2026 outlook published in May. The anticipated wave of mega IPOs, she told Bloomberg, represents both an opportunity and a liquidity test for markets that have grown accustomed to abundant private capital. Fitzpatrick pointed to the sheer dollar amounts involved: $75 billion for SpaceX alone, with additional tens of billions expected from the AI lab listings. The question is not whether there is enough capital to absorb these offerings, she argued, but whether the absorption will starve other corners of the market, particularly the crypto and venture secondary ecosystems that have thrived on the same pool of risk-seeking dollars.

One answer to that question arrived in an unlikely form. In May, Polymarket, the crypto-based prediction market platform, partnered with Nasdaq Private Market to launch contracts tied to milestones of privately held companies, as CoinDesk reported. The partnership effectively opened a $5 trillion private market to retail traders who had never been able to access it. A trader in Singapore could now take a position on whether a specific AI company would hit a given valuation by a given date, without ever touching a cap table. The offering sits in a regulatory gray zone, but its existence is a direct response to the structural mismatch between demand for private-company exposure and the limited channels through which it is available.

The Polymarket-Nasdaq deal is not an isolated experiment. It is part of a broader push to build secondary liquidity infrastructure that does not require the consent of the underlying company. Streamex Corp., a publicly traded firm on Nasdaq under the ticker STEX, and the decentralized exchange Orca announced in late May the launch of what they called a "24/7 decentralized secondary liquidity infrastructure for tokenized securities," with a gold-backed digital asset called GLDY serving as the inaugural instrument, Business Insider reported. By tokenizing real-world assets and placing them on a decentralized exchange, Streamex and Orca are building a secondary market that operates continuously, without the gatekeeping functions that make traditional private securities trading so cumbersome.

The Streamex announcement is easy to dismiss as a press release from a small-cap company trading well below its IPO price. But the underlying thesis deserves attention. The firm is betting that the same architecture that enabled 24/7 crypto markets can be applied to tokenized versions of traditional assets, beginning with commodities and eventually extending to private securities. If the model works for GLDY, the path to tokenized pre-IPO equity becomes shorter. The key question, as with all tokenization projects, is whether the legal wrapper around the token, not just the technology, holds up under regulatory scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission has not yet issued guidance specific to decentralized secondary trading of tokenized private securities, and that silence is itself a signal.

What makes this moment different from previous secondary market expansions is the simultaneity. In earlier cycles, the secondary market grew in one direction at a time. During the late 2010s, platforms like Forge and EquityZen expanded access for accredited investors. During the 2021-2022 peak, SPACs provided an alternative liquidity path for companies that wanted to bypass the traditional IPO process. The current moment combines retail access via prediction markets, institutional volume via Morgan Stanley's acquisition of EquityZen, decentralized infrastructure via Streamex and Orca, and the gravitational pull of the largest IPO in history. Each force amplifies the others.

For venture capitalists, the implications are uncomfortable. The secondary market has always been the escape valve that allowed VCs to manage their own liquidity constraints: selling a portion of a position on the secondary market to return capital to LPs while maintaining enough exposure to capture the IPO pop. But when the companies themselves are fighting to restrict secondary trading, and when the IPO window is being dominated by a single mega-offering that may drain rather than create liquidity for smaller names, the valve is no longer reliable. LPs who allocated heavily to venture in 2021 and 2022 are now sitting on portfolios where distributions have fallen well below the historical average, and the secondary market, rather than bridging the gap, is becoming another source of friction.

The Goldman team that described the private markets' distribution machinery as broken was making a narrower point about private equity fund structures. But the metaphor applies across the entire private markets complex. Liquidity is the circulatory system of finance. When it fails, healthy tissue dies. The current moment is not a failure yet. Trading volumes are at records, not at zero. But the direction of travel, with companies tightening transfer restrictions just as retail demand surges and decentralized infrastructure arrives to circumvent both, suggests that the system is heading toward a confrontation it was not designed to handle.

What to watch: the SEC's posture on tokenized securities trading, which could clarify or complicate the Streamex model; the post-IPO performance of SpaceX, which will either validate the secondary market's pricing signals or expose them as froth; and whether Anthropic's narrowed list of unauthorized platforms holds or expands again. The liquidity question is not going to be resolved by any single IPO, platform, or regulatory action. It is going to be resolved by whether the private market's circulatory system can adapt, structurally, to the volume of capital now trying to move through it. The answer will be written in cap tables, not in press releases.