David Angliss, an analyst with Australia’s leading cryptocurrency investment firm, Apollo Capital, shares the fund’s regular take on what’s happening in the fast-changing and volatile cryptocurrency space.

This week David Angliss is helping Stockhead refresh its memory about a unique Aussie-founded project called prePO. And there’s good reason to revisit it, which we’ll get into further below.

 

What is prePO?

The PO stands for “public offering”. As its Aussie founder Xavier Ekkel explained to us when we chatted to him about it late last year, “prePO is a decentralised trading platform allowing anyone, anywhere, to gain exposure to any pre-IPO company or pre-token project.”

Its mission is to democratise pre-public equity – “transforming a world of financial exclusion into a world of permissionless access”.

What that means is that you, your mates, your mum, the old bloke shouting at pigeons in the park… anyone can effectively speculate financially on companies at a super, super early stage of investment.

“You don’t have to be an accredited investor to take advantage of potential opportunities through prePO,” said Angliss. “It gives everyday crypto investors access into big IPO raises, such as Coinbase, Reddit – raises of that kind of quality.

“It’s a hot, niche project. It’s a very niche market they’re going after. I believe there’s no other cryptocurrency that’s doing this or looking to solve this problem.”

And it’s a good one to bring to the forefront again, he explained, because prePO has just completed a highly successful presale for whitelisted investors. An actually “pretty incredible” presale, enthused the Apollo Capital analyst.

 

Blink-and-miss-it presale

How incredible a presale? It sold out in just under 18 minutes and exceeded the cap in just 34 seconds.

That’s the sort of excitement usually seen at the height of a frenzied, “buy, buy, buy!” bull market, not in the depths of a macro-led crypto winter generally short on the energy needed to keep things warm.

The project raised $390,000 at $0.06 per PPO token and with a fully diluted valuation of $60 million.

“We’re really excited by the performance of the presale,” said Angliss. “There’s obviously a real appetite for this product within DeFi, considering it sold out at a $60 million valuation, which is probably much higher than average compared with the amounts projects are raising at the moment within the crypto VC landscape.”

And what’s also interesting about this presale is that the PPO token isn’t actually for sale on the secondary market at this stage. “It’s non-transferable, non-tradable, but it’s still fully functional within the prePO platform – where holders will be able to engage in governance and staking and then rewards.”

The presale follows prePO’s $2.1 million strategic round earlier this year, led by Republic Capital and IOSG Ventures, and which included founders from notable crypto enterprises Gnosis, 1inch, Moonbeam, Zapper and several others. Apollo Capital also took part and is a long-term investor and adviser to the project. 

 

Will there be another public sale of PPO?

The prePO platform is expected to launch later this year, said Angliss, followed by the launch of PPO staking and gamified staking rewards.

As for a wider public sale of PPO, “they plan to have plenty of ‘mini sales’ throughout the next year, but no dates have been announced yet,” said Angliss.

As for the token itself and what it does, it’s a “governance and utility token” which has the purpose to “incentivise high-quality active participation in long-term alignment with the platform and DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation).

“The token’s governance aspect essentially gives holders the ability to vote on various things, including treasury and council-member matters, new markets and what sort of IPOs the DAO will list. And stakers receive a share of all the protocol’s fees, such as those associated with traded deposit withdrawals or early unstaking, for example.

“And one other thing to note – it’ll be launching on the layer 2 Ethereum network Arbitrum, with potential aspirations to go cross chain in the future.”

So would this one be classified as a DeFi 2.0 project? Angliss says no, as it’s a bit more of its own unique category. “You could think of it perhaps a bit more as being in the synthetic assets category – because it’s creating kind of synthetic presale prices for these IPOs.”

 

Building through the bear market

One last thing that’s reassuring to hear about the project is that it’s taken a very strategic, bear-market-building path.

“I know, through project updates, that they have enough capital to withstand a multi-year bear market and are pretty happy to weather it out as long as it takes,” said Angliss. “They’re being very strategic with their spending and allocation of resources.”

For more info about prePO and the token, check out the official prePO docs here.

 

Note: none of the views expressed in this article should be taken as financial advice. 

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