2025 is the year of cryptoequity 🔥 In 2021, @balajis.eth wrote his prescient "Mirror Table" article, arguing that the simplest way to bring equity onchain was by mirroring a company’s cap table. Fast forward to 2025: we can go beyond mirroring because the infrastructure now exists to make cryptoequity a reality. First and foremost, capitalization data now has an open-source format. Back in 2021, cap table knowledge was proprietary. Actors like Carta & AngelList thrived by keeping their "secret sauce" locked up. But things changed when the Open Cap Table Coalition—backed by all top-tier US law firms (Gunderson, Orrick, Cooley, etc.)—released the first-ever open-source cap table format. This started the commoditization of cap tables. And @fairmint pushed it further by putting this format onchain with the Open Cap Table protocol. No more "mirroring." Fully compliant onchain cap tables are now a reality. 2025 is the year cryptoequity takes off 🚀 https://x.com/balajis/status/1881239201657876895

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A great article from 2013 from Scott Kupor guest posting on @pmarca 's blog. Scott Kupor has a compelling argument that the progressive reduction of the "tick size" (the minimum increment in which stock prices can trade) has had a profound negative impact on small cap IPOs. This argument makes sense: the tick size of a stock should be inversely correlated to its liquidity. * The more liquid the stock, the smaller you want the tick size -> higher price definition, favoring retail investors and HFT. * For less liquid stocks, you want a larger tick size -> more interesting for market makers to trade the stock and increase its liquidity. Once we put equity onchain, we have programmable equity (cc @fairmint 🔥 ) and markets where the tick size could be a function of the liquidity. What is sure is that innovation in that field will come from the private market. Public markets are way too regulated to welcome any innovation at this stage. https://marcstaging.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle-class/

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This chart is nuts 🤯 Wealth creation now entirely happens in the private market. Sorry dear US retail investor 🤷 Gary has protected you so much that you are now protected from even accessing the best assets in the world. Only memecoin lottery tokens for you... We need to make IPOs great again!

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This is the way 🫡

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I will die on that hill :)

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Hot channel alert ⚠️ 📢

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Do you know that all public stocks today are legally owned by Cede & Co? It originated from the "paper crisis" that happened in the sixties, when stock markets got clogged due to transactions happening faster than stocks could move 👀 At the time, stock were only represented by "stock certificates" and 1 tx involved 14 persons located in different buildings to update the underlying cap table. It was so bad that they regularly increased the settlement time (went up to 5 days) and even sometime halted the stock market. In 1968, $4B of transaction failed (~3 days of trading volume). It is at that time that the Central Certificate Service (CCS, the ancestor of the DTCC) was created, to reduce certificates movement by immobilizing them in a central entity. This is why today, the vast majority of public stocks are legally owned by Cede & Co, the nominee structure of the DTCC. This is the solution that was found to prevent cap tables to be updated at every trade. Now you know :)

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Just for the LOL, one day I'll contact the Transfer Agents of all the public companies in which I own stock to ask them to send me stock certificates. I say "for the LOL" because, once you receive your stock certificate, this is *literally* your shares. If you want to sell your shares, well, you need to physically transfer your stock certificate. So you'd better be long 😅

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To understand why equity transactions today takes 1 full day to settle, you have to understand that every single equity transaction involves no less than NINE intermediaries 👀

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Since last week, the tradfi infrastructure for equities transaction is now able to settle trades in **check notes** 86400 seconds.... Yay! 😬 🙈

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Turns out the right time to IPO for cap table management tools was 2021... and that opportunity is NOT coming back 🤷 The business opportunity for selling glorified spreadsheets has passed: https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/06/cartas-valuation-to-be-cut-by-billions-in-an-upcoming-secondary-sale/?guccounter=1

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A consequence of companies staying private for longer: the market for secondary transactions is exploding 🚀 (src: NYT) This market was only ~$5B in 2010!

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If you're an equity compensation nerd, I can't recommend enough the latest episode of BG2. In-depth analysis on how (and why) the market moved from stock options to RSUs, why RSUs are a terrible for incentive alignment around shareholder value creation etc... A great episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPt6Cs1hd2k

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How much have you spent on your cap table management tool so far? https://warpcast.com/joris/0xf3ea1dbe

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TIL that companies lending money to option holders (so they can exercise their options) is bad. The reason is: if the company goes down, the stockholder will have to recognize the loan as ordinary income and pay taxes on it 👀 https://youtu.be/SoTOF-plFwc?si=IHZTI8H-MKY6MRK7&t=3124

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