Is the secondary market going to slow down?

What is it that investors want: exposure to Anthropic, or exposure to something exceptional — something they can't easily own?

Recently some folks were worried about the secondary market. We see the point. Anthropic's sky-high secondary valuations and mega-round talks make 2026 public markets look like a looming threat to private secondary activity. Emily M. Zheng in this week's PitchBook webinar, Liquidity Reimagined: Tender Offers, SPVs, and the Venture Secondary Surge, made the point: secondary activity is heavily concentrated around top names, and when the mega-IPOs (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) eventually go public, all this secondary activity will migrate to public exchanges.

And there's another force at work: some companies are actively fighting to control secondary trading. Anthropic and Anduril Industries are restricting all unauthorised secondary sales. Revolut goes further — practically internalising liquidity and monetising its own secondaries.

These are transformative events for the secondary market, for sure. But will they stop individuals and institutions from wanting exposure to something exceptional?

Venture secondaries is not one market

As Alan Vaksman puts it, the venture secondary market — just like the public market — is not one market. It already has distinct tools and products for institutional and wealth investors.

We can go further: assets on the secondary market already have two prices based on ticket size. We observe pricing for both institutional (>$50K) and wealth (≤$50K) deals, and the markup is significant:

On the retail side: nothing can stop the risk appetite

Not even a Hormuz crisis, apparently.

A16z published a piece on retail's growing appetite for risk: "Retail is buying with more leverage, more frequency, and generally speaking, more optimism than ever before... Retail cash is tracking ~12% above the January 2021 meme-stock peak, and retail option volumes are on a similar record-breaking trajectory, pacing roughly 60% above the historical monthly average."

Levered ETFs tell the same story.

High-risk retail investors are already trying to buy Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI on the secondary market at retail prices. But here's the real question: once these companies are inside every major index like the S&P 500, will they still carry that "can't easily own it" premium?

We think retail will simply move on to the next exceptional thing. The secondary market will follow.

What about institutional appetite?

Institutions have always played it safer, and it's fair to say that appetite for pre-IPO secondary will be shaped by how the three mega-IPOs actually perform. But institutional secondary is not just a safe pre-IPO play.

Prediction market platforms are testing the waters for institutional money — Kalshi, which built its user base on individual traders, is now actively going after Wall Street.

On our side, every month our Activity Ranking surfaces new emerging names. In May, the standouts were: Saronic, Apptronik, Gecko Robotics, Ayar Labs, and PsiQuantum — defence tech, robotics, and quantum computing.

Venture capital has always had tools to manage risk across a portfolio. What we're watching now is the secondary market borrowing those tools — and introducing them to secondary investors, both institutional and wealth, starting with thematic portfolio exposure.

And there's still the original reason the secondary market exists at all: liquidity. A significant cohort of companies — and their shareholders — still need the secondary market simply to unlock value from illiquid positions. That problem hasn't been solved. Not even close. IPO windows close, primary rounds take time, and for many companies the secondary market remains the only functioning liquidity mechanism available. That demand isn't going anywhere regardless of what happens with the mega-IPOs.

Can companies really stop investors from getting exposure?

This is not a new question.

Humans have been engineering around ownership restrictions since roughly 1750 BC. Mesopotamian clay tablets record forward contracts on grain and silver — you agree today on a price for delivery later. You never need to own the grain. You own the claim.

In 17th century Amsterdam, traders were dealing in forward contracts on VOC shares almost as soon as the exchange opened. By the 1630s, tulip mania was partly fuelled by futures on bulbs that didn't exist yet. The Dutch invented the idea that price exposure ≠ ownership.

Perpetual bonds emerged from the same logic applied to sovereign debt: states needed to borrow vast sums for wars but couldn't commit to a repayment date. The Dutch Republic issued perpetual annuities in the 1600s. Britain formalised the structure with Consols in 1751 — instruments that paid 3% annually with no maturity date, and traded on the London market for over 250 years. The last ones were redeemed in 2015.

Options were considered disreputable for centuries — England's Barnard's Act of 1733 tried to ban them outright. The real breakthrough came in 1973 with Black-Scholes-Merton, which gave options a mathematical price based on volatility. Once you could price uncertainty formally, the market exploded. The CBOE opened the same year.

And now we have tokenisation. With the right structure, you can get economic exposure to almost anything — including private companies with ironclad transfer restrictions.

So, will the secondary market slow down?

It will look different. The demand won't.

The mega-IPOs will absorb some of the most concentrated secondary activity. Some access routes will get shut down or litigated. But every time an asset has become hard to own, markets have invented a way around it — and technology keeps lowering the cost of doing so.

The riskier side of the secondary market isn't slowing. We'd bet on it accelerating.