Injective Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain tailored for decentralized finance, has rolled out onchain pre-IPO perpetual markets, allowing investors around the world to trade synthetic shares of prominent private companies, including OpenAI.

This new product permits users to utilize leverage of up to five times on the valuations of private firms directly via Injective, which the protocol claims will set it apart from centralized offerings such as those from Robinhood.

Per Injective’s announcement on Wednesday, these Pre-IPO perpetuals leverage onchain data obtained from Seda Protocol, which provides decentralized oracle infrastructure to facilitate price data on blockchains, along with Caplight, which gathers private market pricing data for venture-backed enterprises.

“Unlike other pre-IPO solutions from Robinhood and others, Injective’s Pre-IPO perps are uniquely designed,” the protocol stated, emphasizing attributes like full onchain execution, programmability, composability, and capital efficiency.

The inaugural pre-IPO perpetual market will feature OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, with trading opportunities available on Helix, a decentralized exchange constructed on Injective. More private firms are set to join in October.

Injective asserts that this launch furthers its overall goal to “bring every financial market onchain,” spotlighting its commitment to real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and extending DeFi into conventional markets.

The RWA market has experienced rapid growth in recent months, with the total value of onchain financial assets nearing $32 billion, per industry statistics.

The RWA landscape is predominantly comprised of private credit and US Treasury debt. Source

A Clear Contrast to Robinhood’s Private Equity Tokens

Historically, access to the pre-IPO market has been limited to institutional or accredited participants, creating barriers for retail investors. Injective’s framework employs onchain perpetual derivatives linked to reference prices of private firms, presenting a decentralized and permissionless avenue for exposure, albeit not comparable to actual equity ownership.

This distinction gains significance in light of Robinhood’s regulatory challenges earlier this year regarding its “private equity tokens,” with entities like OpenAI clarifying that those products do not equate to ownership shares. In contrast, as noted by Galaxy Digital, Robinhood’s fine print indicates that the equity tokens are “derivatives that provide indirect exposure to the underlying asset.”

Nevertheless, in July, the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood’s main EU regulator, stated it was seeking “clarifications” concerning the company’s stock token offerings.

An Injective representative provided further clarity on the differentiation between the products in a statement: “This is much more uniquely positioned because it’s a perpetual derivative based on a reference price of the Pre-IPO company,” adding that the offering is not available to users residing in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada due to regulatory constraints.