Teaming Up with PreStocks to Enter Pre-IPO, Pump.fun Finds a New Revenue Stream

On October 19, Pump.fun announced that PreStocks has officially launched on the platform. Users can now directly trade Pre-IPO tokens on Pump.fun corresponding to eight companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Neuralink, Figure AI, Kalshi, Polymarket, and Oura.

After the announcement, the PUMP token did not show significant movement, with the price still hovering around $0.0044.

Against the backdrop of the Pre-IPO craze, why did Pump.fun choose to team up with PreStocks to enter the Pre-IPO track? And are the stock tokens bought on PreStocks actually real stocks?

Only Price Exposure, Not Real Equity

PreStocks is a Pre-IPO tokenization platform running on Solana. The platform captures underlying unlisted equity in the primary-secondary market through special purpose vehicles (SPVs), and mints SPL synthetic assets mapped to the corresponding economic exposure based on the Solana Token-2022 standard.

According to its official website, these tokens only provide economic exposure and do not represent real equity. They do not grant holders voting rights, dividend rights, information rights, or any other legal rights, nor are they recognized, authorized, or endorsed by the corresponding companies. The platform explicitly states that it is unavailable to U.S. persons, there is no minimum amount required for trading, and users can buy and sell on DEXs such as Jupiter through a Solana wallet.

PreStocks was formerly known as prePO, founded by Xavier Ekkel in 2021. Ekkel previously worked as a software engineer at Canva. prePO operated on other chains in its early days and completed multiple funding rounds, with investors including Republic Capital and other institutions.

In August 2025, the project was officially renamed PreStocks and migrated to Solana, beginning to issue tokens for specific private companies.

Judging from public data, PreStocks' current scale remains relatively limited.

As of October 20, data on the PreStocks official website shows that its AUM (assets under management) is only $22.37 million.

The latest data shows that OpenAI's tokenized assets had a 24-hour trading volume of $6.47 million, while Anthropic's tokenized assets had a 24-hour trading volume of only $2.92 million. Apart from leading targets such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have a certain level of capital depth, the remaining long-tail assets generally face a lack of liquidity and high slippage, with prices mainly influenced by on-chain supply and demand and market sentiment, lacking an anchor price from public markets.

It is worth emphasizing that the core mechanism of this launch is that it not only supports directly buying and selling these eight major Pre-IPO assets, but also allows users to use these pre-market tokens as underlying pricing/liquidity pairing assets to launch new meme coins — for example, launching a meme that forms a pool with the OpenAI token.

Pump.fun Gains Another Layer of Revenue

For Pump.fun, this integration has a clear business logic. As the largest memecoin launch platform on Solana, Pump.fun's revenue mainly comes from fees charged when users launch tokens and transaction fees from subsequent trading. The core problem the platform faces is that narratives are consumed extremely quickly, requiring the continuous introduction of new, attention-grabbing themes to sustain launch volume and trading activity.

Pre-IPO-related companies themselves have been at the center of market discussion for some time, with names like OpenAI and Anthropic frequently appearing in funding, valuation, and industry developments. Introducing high-profile unicorn pre-market assets into PumpSwap as underlying pricing and liquidity pairing assets essentially injects new structured narrative fuel into the platform. Users can launch new coins around these names, and related trading will increase accordingly, bringing additional fee revenue to the platform.

According to Pump.fun data, although its DEX fee revenue has recovered somewhat, it still lags behind its 2025 peak.

If it can ride the rising wave in the subsequent Pre-IPO boom, it will undoubtedly have a positive impact on its own DEX trading volume and PUMP token buybacks.

Currently, the official has bought back and burned 489.74 million PUMP, accounting for 12.276% of the total supply.

For PreStocks, this is an additional distribution and trading entry point. Even if derivative meme coins incubated based on Pre-IPO asset pairings cannot escape the fate of high elimination rates and short lifecycles, as long as some trading occurs on Pump.fun, both parties can benefit from the fees.

However, the prices of PreStocks tokens are entirely determined by on-chain liquidity and participants' trading behavior, and may be highly volatile.

Some of the listed companies have previously expressed restrictive attitudes toward holding their shares through SPVs, which further increases the uncertainty of such tokens.

In mid-May 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI almost simultaneously updated their equity transfer policies, explicitly stating that share transfers without written board approval are invalid and will not be recognized by the companies. The two companies specifically called out methods including special purpose vehicles (SPVs), tokenization instruments, and contracts.

Anthropic stated in its announcement: "We do not permit special purpose vehicles to acquire Anthropic shares, and any transfer of shares to an SPV is void under our transfer restrictions." OpenAI issued a similar warning, saying that unapproved transactions may be invalid and may not have economic value for the buyer.

This statement directly hit the related tokens issued by PreStocks on Solana. According to CoinMarketCap data, after the warning was issued, the price of Anthropic on PreStocks fell from around $1,400 to $842, a single-day drop of over 26%, while OpenAI fell from $1,984 all the way down to around $890, a drop of about 46%.

The fact that prices plunged merely because of an official statement clearly shows that some investors have significant doubts about its "real legitimacy."

Currently, some investors and traders, for reasons such as liquidity, are turning their attention to other platforms. Hyperliquid and Lighter allow users to take leveraged long or short positions on private company valuations through synthetic perpetual contracts, without holding any underlying interest through an SPV.

These products rely entirely on price oracles and margin mechanisms, with low trading barriers and high leverage, but they also face forced liquidation risks, and after companies explicitly restricted equity transfers, some related markets have also experienced closures or shrinking liquidity.

For PreStocks, this is a new distribution channel; for Pump.fun, it is about turning the currently hot Pre-IPO narrative into pairing assets that can generate fees. As for whether these newly launched meme coins can truly bring sustained trading volume, it still depends on the market's acceptance of this kind of "price exposure."

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