DWF Labs Says 12-Year Wait for IPOs Is Fueling On-Chain Demand for Private AI Stakes

A longer runway to initial public offerings is pushing demand for pre-IPO equity exposure into on-chain markets, DWF Labs said in a report. Some private-company stakes are trading at premiums to their underlying market value.

In the May 14 report, DWF Labs said the average time from a company's founding to its stock market debut has expanded from four to five years in the 1990s to about 12 years today. That shift is drawing retail investors to blockchain-based alternative investment products.

Retail investors mainly use three structures to gain exposure to pre-IPO companies, according to the report: special purpose vehicle-backed tokens, synthetic perpetual futures contracts and registered closed-end funds.

Those products trade at prices about 20% to 40% above private-market valuations, the report said. DWF Labs attributed the distortion to a lack of instruments that let investors bet on price declines.

Artificial intelligence companies accounted for the largest share of the market by sector, while crypto-related firms drew the strongest demand on a per-company basis.

Data from over-the-counter stock trading platform Hiive showed the average transaction size exceeded $1 million as of 2025. Returns on the Hiive50 Index also outpaced traditional market benchmarks including the S&P 500.

The most valuable stage of corporate growth is increasingly trapped in private markets as companies remain unlisted for longer, Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs, said in the report. That is generating demand for investment through on-chain markets, though the supporting infrastructure remains limited.

Grachev also said companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are signaling strict controls on share transfers tied to unauthorized tokenized investment products. If legal rights to the underlying assets are unclear, investors could face a bank-run-like scenario in which asset value cannot be assured during redemptions.