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

The rich get richer, while the little guy gets shut out.

It’s a familiar story, especially in the United States, with its complicated rules that mean retail investors get cut out from opportunities to buy into early-stage tech companies like Facebook and Uber.

But crypto is on a mission to democratise access to capital and investment opportunities, through uncensorable permissionless protocols built on smart contract platforms such as Ethereum.

Apollo Capital is a seed investor in prePO, a platform that will allow anyone to speculate on the value of pre-IPO companies or pre-token projects.

Users could take synthetic positions in pre-IPO companies such as SpaceX, Reddit, Discord, Stripe, Canva and Gemini, along with pre-token projects such as Zapper, OpenSea and MetaMask.

Each market will have a specific valuation range and will expire either when the first day an asset goes public, or on a time-weighted average after that event. If the asset doesn’t go public by the expiry date, traders can exit their positions at the bottom of the market’s valuation range.

“So it’s essentially using synthetic assets and derivatives, to allow individuals to speculate on the price of pre-IPO company, or a pre-token project in crypto,” David Angliss says.

A picture from prePO’s briefing materials sums up the appeal of the project, he says.

“You’ve got the degen trader guy not being able to participate in say, Robinhood, Coinbase, SpaceX, Airbnb, because he’s not an accredited investor, and he doesn’t have the minimum requirements,” Angliss says.

 

“The decentralised nature of the project offers several key factors which TradFi (traditional finance) doesn’t offer: it gives you access for all, there’s no intermediaries, participation rewards, community-driven, fast and low cost.”

The project was founded by former Canva software engineer Xavier Ekkel, a Melbournian now based in Singapore.

Apollo was one of several institutions to take part in the $1.1 million seed round, which was conducted in July.

The project also recently got some favourable coverage in the AFR.

PrePO is set to launch early next year on a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. The project last week released Acquisition Royale, a play-to-earn NFT game themed around mergers and acquisitions.

A core element of the project’s vision for prePO is bringing gamification elements to DeFi, making it more fun and accessible.

The views, information, or opinions expressed in the interview in this article are solely those of the interviewee and do not represent the views of Stockhead. Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.

Read MoreCryptocurrency

You might be interested in