The Future of IPOs: Why Solana Could Be the Next NASDAQ

The traditional Initial Public Offering process has long been criticized for its inefficiencies, opacity, and tendency to benefit well-connected insiders at the expense of founders and retail investors. In a recent episode of Lightspeed, Lucas Bruder, Max Resnick, and Austin Federa engaged in a fascinating discussion about the state of Internet Capital Markets (ICM) and whether blockchain technology—specifically Solana—could provide a superior alternative to traditional IPO mechanisms. Their conversation, which touched on everything from hypothetical SpaceX listings to the very real $3.2 billion pricing disaster at the recent Figma IPO, provides a compelling glimpse into how financial markets might evolve in the coming years.

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The timing of this discussion could not have been more prescient. Just one day before the conversation took place, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced "Project Crypto," with Commissioner Adkins publicly stating that the agency wants to bring financial markets onchain. This regulatory shift, combined with the technical capabilities that Solana has demonstrated in handling massive capital formation events, suggests that the hypothetical scenario of major companies IPOing onchain may not remain hypothetical for much longer.

The SpaceX Hypothetical: A Thought Experiment in Onchain Finance

The conversation began with a provocative hypothetical posed by one of the hosts: What if Elon Musk decided to take SpaceX public and, with advice from Solana advisor Nikita Beyer, chose to do so on the Solana blockchain? Assuming regulatory barriers were removed, how close is the technology to supporting such a momentous event? This thought experiment served as a framework for examining the current state of blockchain infrastructure and its readiness for mainstream capital markets applications.

The question cuts to the heart of what Internet Capital Markets proponents believe is the fundamental value proposition of blockchain technology in finance. Rather than viewing cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchains as purely speculative assets, the ICM thesis holds that these networks should serve as superior infrastructure for all forms of capital formation and exchange. The SpaceX hypothetical represents the ultimate test case—a company valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, with massive global investor interest, conducting its public listing on decentralized infrastructure.

Lucas Bruder, co-founder of Jito Labs, offered a philosophical framework for evaluating success in this domain. "I would view success for any execution layer as being able to facilitate more value transaction and more asset issuance than the underlying asset itself is worth," he explained. This perspective challenges the commonly held belief that an L1 blockchain's market cap must exceed the total value of assets issued on top of it. Bruder explicitly noted that "there are a lot of people who fundamentally disagree with me on this, but I think it's a failure case for this technology if the market cap of the L1 must be more than the market cap of the things issued on top of it."

This view represents a significant departure from the "security budget" arguments that have dominated blockchain discourse, particularly in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities. It suggests that the true measure of a blockchain's success is not its token price or market capitalization, but rather its utility as infrastructure for the broader financial system.

The Figma IPO Disaster: A $3.2 Billion Case Study in Broken Markets

Max Resnick, a researcher known for his work on execution and market structure, provided crucial context by highlighting the catastrophic mispricing of the recent Figma IPO. Traditional investment banks, he argued, managed to "incinerate $3.2 billion" by pricing Figma shares at approximately one-third of what the market was willing to pay. This wasn't an isolated incident—Resnick noted that similar outcomes had occurred with Circle's public listing just a month prior, and predicted that "they're going to do it again for 30 more startups this cycle because it's kind of frothy and they don't know what they're doing."

The mechanics of how this happens are almost comically primitive given the sophistication we might expect from Wall Street's finest institutions. "It's some guy in his cubicle with his spreadsheet and he types a few numbers in and multiplies three random numbers together and gets a valuation," Resnick explained. "And then they go on CNBC and they say, 'Oh, we're 30x oversubscribed.' It's like you ask anybody in the first year of their econ course whether being 30x more demand than supply is a good outcome for the market. They will tell you absolutely not."

This criticism strikes at the fundamental inefficiency of traditional IPO pricing mechanisms. When demand exceeds supply by a factor of 30, it means the asset was dramatically underpriced, and the difference between the offering price and the true market-clearing price represents value that was transferred from the company and its existing shareholders to those fortunate enough to receive allocations. The beneficiaries of this mispricing are typically not retail investors or even most institutional investors, but rather the "friends and family" of the investment banks conducting the offering.

Resnick's critique highlights the permissionlessness problem inherent in traditional capital markets. "If you don't have a connect at Goldman Sachs or whoever did the IPO for Figma, you're not getting into that private round at a third of the valuation of what the thing should have been priced at," he noted. This access disparity creates a system where wealth accumulation opportunities are distributed based on social connections rather than capital allocation efficiency or merit.

Gavil and the Technology of Fair Price Discovery

The conversation turned to existing solutions that could address these pricing inefficiencies. Resnick highlighted Gavil, a product built by Ellipsis Labs, as an example of technology that already exists and could transform how new assets enter price discovery. Originally designed for fair launching meme coins, Gavil was "built for this exact application, which is we have an asset which we are listing and it's going to enter price discovery. How do we do that in such a way that it's not the first to get there, but it's the person who wants to pay the most that gets the asset."

The distinction between "first to arrive" and "highest bidder" mechanisms is crucial for understanding why blockchain-based auctions could be superior to traditional IPO processes. In a first-come-first-served model, technical advantages (like co-location with exchanges or faster network connections) or social advantages (like relationships with underwriters) determine who gets access. In a well-designed auction mechanism, capital allocation is determined purely by willingness to pay, which generally correlates with how much value an investor believes they can extract from or add to an investment.

Resnick emphasized that the technology for conducting these auctions already exists and could be made even better with improvements to Solana's infrastructure. "We have price discovery with minimal $3.2 billion incineration events where you pay your friends and family who got into the round," he explained, contrasting this with the traditional model where massive value transfers to connected insiders are built into the system's design.

The mention of "multiliter" technology enabling faster price discovery suggests that ongoing infrastructure improvements to Solana will continue to expand the range of applications suitable for onchain execution. Faster auction mechanisms mean tighter price discovery, which means less value leakage to arbitrageurs and better outcomes for both issuers and investors.

Pump.fun and the Stress Test of Onchain Capital Formation

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Solana is ready for serious capital formation events came from Resnick's discussion of the PUMP token launch. "With the pump ICO, we did 600 mil of capital raise for that in 12 minutes and didn't go down, even though the exchanges went down," he noted. This represented a significant stress test for the network's ability to handle concentrated, high-demand capital formation events.

The fact that centralized exchanges experienced outages while Solana maintained functionality speaks to the robustness of the network's architecture. When the most demanded event of the moment causes centralized infrastructure to fail but decentralized infrastructure continues operating, it validates the fundamental thesis that blockchain networks can provide more reliable execution for high-stakes financial operations.

Resnick's assessment of Solana's readiness was cautiously optimistic: "I think we're kind of ready right now for the initial IPOs." The qualifier "kind of" acknowledges that handling something at the scale of a SpaceX IPO would represent a significant step up in volume and sustained activity, but the foundational capabilities appear to be in place.

The Hyperliquid Problem: Keeping Value in the Ecosystem

While the conversation emphasized Solana's capabilities for primary market activities (IPOs and token launches), Resnick raised an important concern about secondary market activity. He pointed to what happened following the PUMP token launch as a cautionary tale: "What happened with hype is now they took a lot of the pump volume, even though pump launched on Solana and we handled it really well, they took a lot of the volume for themselves because they were able to offer in some ways a better product for perpetual futures on top of pump."

This dynamic—where assets are issued on one chain but trading activity migrates to another platform offering better derivatives products—represents a significant challenge for the ICM thesis. If Solana can handle IPOs but derivatives trading moves to competitors like Hyperliquid, then much of the network effect and fee revenue associated with that asset will accrue elsewhere.

Resnick framed this as a central motivation for ongoing development efforts: "So I think that's kind of where this roadmap is going is how do we let apps on Solana take the Hyperliquid volume and put it on Solana. And then when somebody launches an asset like SpaceX on Solana, it doesn't end up being a huge windfall for Hyperliquid."

This perspective suggests that the ICM roadmap extends beyond just primary market capabilities to include the full spectrum of financial products that sophisticated investors demand. Perpetual futures, options, structured products, and other derivatives need to be available on Solana-native applications to prevent value leakage to competing platforms.

Austin Federa on the Regulatory Shift

Austin Federa, the Solana Foundation's head of strategy, provided crucial context about the changing regulatory environment that makes onchain IPOs increasingly plausible. "We're also a day after the SEC announced Project Crypto where Adkins stood up and said we want to bring financial markets onchain, which was remarkable to hear and a very big deal," he explained.

This regulatory shift represents a dramatic change from even a few years ago, when the SEC was primarily known for enforcement actions against cryptocurrency projects. The explicit statement that the agency wants to facilitate moving financial markets onto blockchain infrastructure suggests a new era of regulatory cooperation rather than confrontation.

Federa acknowledged that while discussing SpaceX IPOing onchain might seem "a little silly," he predicted that "it might not look silly in a couple of years based on just what the mood is in Washington right now." This assessment reflects the rapid pace of change in regulatory attitudes toward blockchain technology and its applications in traditional finance.

The regulatory shift matters enormously because, until recently, the primary barrier to onchain IPOs was not technical but legal. Companies contemplating public listings must consider not just whether the technology can handle the event, but whether conducting an IPO on blockchain infrastructure would expose them to regulatory risk. With the SEC now explicitly encouraging such innovation, this barrier appears to be diminishing.

The Cascade Effect: Why One Successful Onchain IPO Changes Everything

Resnick offered a compelling theory about how the transition to onchain IPOs might unfold. Rather than a gradual adoption curve, he predicted a sudden cascade effect once the first major success occurs. "I think as soon as one does it, it's going to be like, you're going to see one does it and it goes successful and nothing problematic happens. It's just going to be a cascade of them because what is kind of holding it back is this, oh, like, nobody got fired because they incinerated $3.2 billion of Figma assets."

This insight cuts to the heart of how corporate decision-making works in practice. The Figma IPO pricing disaster should, by any rational measure, have resulted in consequences for those responsible. A $3.2 billion value transfer from the company's existing shareholders to well-connected IPO allocatees represents a massive failure of fiduciary duty. Yet Resnick notes that "nobody got fired" for this outcome, because following the traditional playbook provides career protection regardless of results.

Conversely, choosing a non-traditional approach like a direct listing or onchain offering carries career risk even if it produces better outcomes. "You can get fired if you do a direct listing and it doesn't go well," Resnick explained. This asymmetry—where following convention protects careers regardless of outcomes, while innovation exposes decision-makers to blame—creates powerful inertia toward maintaining the status quo.

The cascade dynamic occurs because the first successful onchain IPO breaks this asymmetric risk calculation. Once someone demonstrates that the new approach works, it becomes acceptable—even expected—for others to follow. "The first person who does it, they're going to kind of open the floodgates and it's going to be acceptable to do for every other company after that," Resnick predicted.

The Accountability Argument: Why Traditional Finance Needs Disruption

Resnick made a passionate case that the traditional IPO process suffers from a fundamental accountability problem. "First of all, you need to fire the person at Figma who made the decision to do this IPO. You probably should fire the analysts who priced it so wrong. Like those people should be fired, but also like we should reward people who don't do that and make the right decision."

This criticism extends beyond any individual IPO to the structural incentives of the traditional system. Investment banks are compensated primarily through underwriting fees, which are a percentage of the total amount raised. They face no penalty for underpricing shares, and in fact benefit from it because underpricing ensures that the offering is "successful" in the sense that all shares are sold. The banks' institutional clients who receive allocations benefit from the underpricing, strengthening those relationships.

The people who lose in this arrangement are the company's founders, employees, and existing shareholders, who receive less capital than they should have in exchange for the equity they're giving up. They also include retail investors who can only buy shares on the secondary market at prices that reflect the true demand, rather than the artificially suppressed IPO price.

An onchain auction mechanism realigns these incentives by making price discovery transparent and permissionless. If the market is willing to pay $100 per share, the auction will discover that price, and the company will receive $100 per share worth of capital. There's no intermediary extracting value by artificially depressing prices for their favored clients.

Internet Capital Markets: Beyond Meme Coins

Federa raised an important question about the broader vision for Internet Capital Markets: "How does like real finance that pertains to products in the real world that are not meme coins, like actually coming onchain? What does that look like?"

This question acknowledges that much of the recent activity in onchain capital formation has involved meme coins and other assets without clear real-world utility or cash flows. While these launches have provided valuable stress tests for infrastructure and demonstrated product-market fit for certain auction mechanisms, they represent only a small fraction of the total addressable market for capital formation.

The transition from meme coins to "real finance" requires both technical capabilities and institutional acceptance. The technical side—as demonstrated by the PUMP launch—appears to be largely in place. The institutional side is evolving rapidly, driven by regulatory clarity, growing familiarity with blockchain technology among traditional finance professionals, and demonstrated cost savings from eliminating intermediaries.

Federa noted that watching this transition "will be an interesting one to watch play out over the next couple of years." This timeline suggests that while the technology and regulatory environment may be approaching readiness, the cultural and institutional shifts required for widespread adoption will take additional time to materialize.

The Definition of Success for Execution Layers

Bruder's comment about what constitutes success for an execution layer deserves deeper examination. By arguing that the L1 market cap should not need to exceed the value of assets issued on top of it, he's proposing a fundamentally different vision for what blockchain networks are and how they should be valued.

The conventional view holds that blockchains need substantial market caps to provide security budgets sufficient to prevent attacks. Under this model, valuable assets issued on a blockchain are only safe if the cost of attacking the network exceeds the potential profit from such an attack. This creates a recursive relationship where asset issuance requires security, security requires stake value, and stake value derives in part from the assets issued on the network.

Bruder's alternative view suggests that blockchains should be valued primarily as infrastructure rather than as stores of value in their own right. Under this model, a blockchain could successfully host trillions of dollars in assets even if its native token had a relatively modest market cap, as long as other security mechanisms (like validator reputation, legal frameworks, or technical architecture) provided sufficient protection.

This perspective is particularly relevant for Solana, which has emphasized high throughput and low costs rather than maximum decentralization or token price appreciation. If the goal is to serve as infrastructure for the global financial system, then the network's success should be measured by volume of activity and value of assets supported, rather than by the market cap of SOL.

Solana's Technical Advantages for Capital Markets

The discussion highlighted several technical characteristics of Solana that make it particularly well-suited for capital markets applications. The network's high throughput—demonstrated by handling the 600 million dollar PUMP raise without service degradation—enables the kind of concentrated activity that characterizes major financial events like IPOs.

Low transaction costs matter enormously for market microstructure. When transaction fees are high or unpredictable, market makers must widen their spreads to compensate for execution risk, which reduces liquidity and increases costs for all participants. Solana's sub-penny transaction costs enable tight spreads and deep liquidity, creating a positive feedback loop where better market quality attracts more activity, which in turn supports even better market quality.

Fast finality is crucial for institutional participation. Traditional financial institutions operate under regulatory frameworks that require certainty about transaction settlement. Solana's approximately 400-millisecond slot time and rapid finality provide the transaction certainty that institutional participants require.

The network's programmability enables sophisticated financial instruments that would be difficult or impossible to create on traditional infrastructure. Smart contracts can encode complex conditional logic, enabling automated market making, structured products, and derivative instruments that settle atomically and transparently.

The Path Forward: What Needs to Happen

Based on the discussion, several conditions need to be met for onchain IPOs to become mainstream:

First, the regulatory environment must continue evolving favorably. The SEC's Project Crypto announcement is encouraging, but clarity is needed on specific questions like how securities laws apply to tokenized equity, what disclosure requirements exist for onchain offerings, and how investor protection mechanisms should work in a blockchain context.

Second, the technology must continue improving. While Solana can handle events like the PUMP launch, handling a sustained trading environment for hundreds or thousands of publicly traded companies requires even greater scale. Ongoing improvements to the network's performance, reliability, and tooling are essential.

Third, derivatives markets must develop on Solana to prevent value leakage to competitors. As Resnick noted, if perpetual futures and other derivatives trade more efficiently elsewhere, significant trading activity will migrate to those venues regardless of where assets are originally issued.

Fourth, institutional infrastructure must mature. Custody solutions, compliance tools, and integration with existing financial systems are necessary for traditional institutions to participate in onchain markets. Significant progress has been made in this area, but gaps remain.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, someone needs to go first. The cascade effect that Resnick described requires a pioneer willing to accept the career risk of doing something new. Once that pioneer demonstrates success, the floodgates open.

The Stakes: Why This Matters

The inefficiencies of traditional capital markets are not merely academic concerns. When Figma loses $3.2 billion in potential capital due to IPO mispricing, that represents real resources that could have funded product development, employee compensation, or shareholder returns. Multiplied across thousands of companies going public each year, the aggregate cost of these inefficiencies reaches into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Beyond direct costs, the access inequities of traditional markets have broader social implications. When IPO allocations flow to well-connected insiders rather than being distributed based on willingness to pay, it reinforces existing patterns of wealth concentration. The permissionless nature of blockchain-based markets could democratize access to capital formation opportunities that have historically been reserved for financial elites.

For Solana specifically, success in capital markets applications would validate the network's technical architecture and positioning. The design decisions that prioritize throughput and cost-efficiency over maximum decentralization make particular sense if the network's primary use case is supporting high-volume financial activity rather than storing value.

Looking Ahead: The Two-Year Horizon

Austin Federa's assessment that what seems silly today might not seem silly in a couple of years provides a useful timeline for thinking about these developments. Within this horizon, we might expect to see:

Continued regulatory clarity as the SEC implements its Project Crypto initiative and provides guidance on tokenized securities.

Additional proof points from successful token launches on Solana demonstrating the network's capability for handling concentrated capital formation events.

Development of more sophisticated derivatives products on Solana-native applications, addressing the value leakage problem identified in the discussion.

Growing institutional infrastructure including custody, compliance, and integration tools that lower barriers to institutional participation.

Potentially, the first major company choosing to conduct its public offering onchain, triggering the cascade effect that transforms this from experimental technology to mainstream practice.

Conclusion: The ICM Thesis Crystallizes

The conversation on Lightspeed represented a crystallization of the Internet Capital Markets thesis into concrete predictions and timelines. The participants agreed that the technology is largely ready, the regulatory environment is improving, and the inefficiencies of traditional systems provide a clear opportunity for disruption.

What remains is execution and timing. Someone needs to go first, demonstrating that onchain IPOs can work for serious companies raising serious capital. Once that proof point exists, the cascade effect should drive rapid adoption as companies recognize they can access fairer pricing, broader participation, and lower costs by moving their capital formation onchain.

For Solana, this represents perhaps the most significant growth opportunity on the horizon. Successfully serving as infrastructure for mainstream capital markets would validate the network's design decisions, attract enormous amounts of activity and attention, and position Solana as genuinely essential financial infrastructure rather than a platform for speculative tokens.

The $3.2 billion Figma mispricing wasn't just a failure of one IPO—it was a demonstration of systemic dysfunction in how we form and allocate capital. If blockchain technology can fix this dysfunction, the implications extend far beyond any single network or asset class. We're watching the potential transformation of how capital flows through the global economy, and Solana appears to be well-positioned to play a central role in that transformation.

The question is no longer whether onchain capital markets are technically feasible—the PUMP launch and countless other events have demonstrated that they are. The question is when they will become institutionally acceptable, and based on this discussion, that moment may be closer than most observers expect. When it arrives, those who are positioned to facilitate it will benefit enormously, while those who cling to the broken systems of the past will find themselves rapidly obsoleted.

As Resnick memorably put it, the ICM roadmap might ultimately be about "getting people at Figma fired"—holding accountable those who perpetuate inefficient systems that destroy billions in value. If blockchain technology can create that accountability while providing superior alternatives, it will have accomplished something truly transformative for the global financial system.

Facts + Figures

• $3.2 billion was lost in the Figma IPO due to severe underpricing by traditional investment banks, with shares being priced at approximately one-third of their true market value.

• The PUMP token launch raised $600 million in just 12 minutes on Solana without any network degradation, while centralized exchanges experienced outages during the same event.

• The SEC announced "Project Crypto" just one day before this discussion, with Commissioner Adkins publicly stating the agency wants to bring financial markets onchain.

• The Figma IPO was 30x oversubscribed, which economists would universally recognize as a sign of dramatic underpricing rather than success.

• Circle's IPO also suffered from similar mispricing issues approximately one month before the Figma disaster, indicating a pattern rather than an isolated incident.

• Gavil, built by Ellipsis Labs, was originally designed for fair launching meme coins but is specifically built to solve the price discovery problem that plagues traditional IPOs.

• Hyperliquid captured significant trading volume from PUMP despite the token launching on Solana, highlighting the need for better derivatives products on Solana-native applications.

• Lucas Bruder argues that it would be a "failure case" if an L1's market cap must exceed the value of assets issued on it, challenging conventional blockchain security assumptions.

• Solana's approximately 400-millisecond slot time provides the fast finality that institutional participants require for regulatory compliance.

• The discussion suggests a two-year timeline for onchain IPOs to move from hypothetical to mainstream practice.

• Traditional IPO pricing involves analysts who "multiply three random numbers together" according to critics, highlighting the primitive nature of current valuation methods.

• Nikita Beyer is mentioned as a Solana advisor who could potentially influence major companies to consider onchain offerings.

• The permissionlessness problem in traditional markets means that without connections to investment banks, investors cannot access underpriced IPO allocations.

• The discussion emphasizes that no one was fired at Figma or the underwriting banks for the $3.2 billion pricing disaster, illustrating accountability failures.

• A cascade effect is predicted once the first successful major onchain IPO occurs, as it will become acceptable for other companies to follow.

• Career risk asymmetry currently protects those who follow traditional IPO processes regardless of outcomes, while punishing innovators who try alternatives.

Questions Answered

How close is Solana to being able to host a major company IPO like SpaceX?

Solana is largely ready for initial IPO activities today based on demonstrated capabilities. The PUMP token launch showed that Solana can handle $600 million in capital formation in 12 minutes without network degradation, even when centralized exchanges failed under the same demand. Max Resnick assessed that "I think we're kind of ready right now for the initial IPOs," while acknowledging that something at SpaceX's scale would represent significant additional volume. The primary remaining challenges are developing better derivatives products to prevent trading activity from migrating to competitors like Hyperliquid, and waiting for the first major company to take the leap and demonstrate success.

What went wrong with the Figma IPO and why does it matter for blockchain?

The Figma IPO was catastrophically underpriced, with shares being offered at approximately one-third of their true market value, resulting in $3.2 billion in value being transferred from Figma shareholders to well-connected IPO allocatees. The offering was 30x oversubscribed, which any first-year economics student would recognize as evidence of severe underpricing. This failure illustrates the fundamental brokenness of traditional IPO mechanisms, where bankers using primitive spreadsheet valuations routinely destroy billions in value. Blockchain-based auction mechanisms like Gavil could solve this by discovering true market prices transparently and permissionlessly, ensuring that capital flows to companies based on actual demand rather than insider relationships.

What is Gavil and how does it solve IPO pricing problems?

Gavil is a product built by Ellipsis Labs that was originally designed for fair launching meme coins but is specifically built for bringing new assets into price discovery fairly. Unlike traditional IPOs where first-come-first-served or social connections determine allocation, Gavil uses auction mechanisms where "the person who wants to pay the most gets the asset." This eliminates the massive value destruction seen in traditional IPOs like Figma's, where underpricing benefits well-connected insiders at the expense of companies and their existing shareholders. The technology exists today and could be enhanced with improvements to Solana's infrastructure for even faster and tighter price discovery.

Why did trading volume from PUMP tokens move to Hyperliquid?

Despite PUMP launching successfully on Solana, Hyperliquid captured significant trading volume because it could offer "in some ways a better product for perpetual futures on top of pump." This highlights a critical challenge for Solana's Internet Capital Markets roadmap: if assets launch on Solana but derivatives trading happens elsewhere, the network loses out on activity and fee revenue associated with those assets. The ICM development roadmap is partly focused on ensuring that applications on Solana can compete effectively for derivatives volume, preventing scenarios where launching an asset like SpaceX on Solana ends up being "a huge windfall for Hyperliquid."

What is the SEC's "Project Crypto" and why is it significant?

Project Crypto is a new SEC initiative announced just before this discussion, where Commissioner Adkins publicly stated that the agency wants to bring financial markets onchain. This represents a dramatic shift from the enforcement-focused approach of recent years and suggests a new era of regulatory cooperation with blockchain innovation. The announcement is significant because regulatory uncertainty has been one of the primary barriers to onchain IPOs—companies have been reluctant to try new approaches without clarity on legal compliance. With the SEC now explicitly encouraging moving financial markets onto blockchain infrastructure, this barrier is rapidly diminishing.

What will trigger widespread adoption of onchain IPOs?

A cascade effect is expected once the first major onchain IPO succeeds without problems. The current barrier is career risk asymmetry: "nobody got fired because they incinerated $3.2 billion of Figma assets," but "you can get fired if you do a direct listing and it doesn't go well." This means executives choosing traditional approaches face no downside regardless of outcomes, while innovators bear career risk. Once someone demonstrates that onchain offerings work, "it's going to kind of open the floodgates and it's going to be acceptable to do for every other company after that." The first mover will change the risk calculus for everyone who follows.

What defines success for a blockchain execution layer according to Jito's co-founder?

Lucas Bruder argues that success for an execution layer should be measured by its ability to "facilitate more value transaction and more asset issuance than the underlying asset itself is worth." He explicitly states that "there are a lot of people who fundamentally disagree with me on this, but I think it's a failure case for this technology if the market cap of the L1 must be more than the market cap of the things issued on top of it." This perspective positions blockchains as infrastructure rather than stores of value, suggesting that a network like Solana could successfully host trillions in assets even with a relatively modest native token market cap.

How does permissionlessness matter for IPO access?

Traditional IPOs are fundamentally exclusionary based on social connections rather than capital efficiency. As Max Resnick explained, "if you don't have a connect at Goldman Sachs or whoever did the IPO for Figma, you're not getting into that private round at a third of the valuation of what the thing should have been priced at." This means wealth-building opportunities flow to insiders while retail investors can only buy on secondary markets at higher prices. Blockchain-based mechanisms are permissionless by design—anyone can participate in an auction regardless of their connections, and allocation is determined by willingness to pay rather than who you know.