Years ahead of the curve

This is an important week for WLTH.

Several years ago, we started building around an idea that was relatively simple to articulate and considerably harder to execute: that access to the world’s best private companies could eventually feel as natural as accessing any other financial asset. We believed that the combination of digital wallets, stablecoins and smart contracts could fundamentally improve the experience, but we also understood that private markets exist within a complex real-world system of ownership, custody, brokerage, banking and regulation. For the idea to mean anything, those two worlds had to work together.

This week, with SpaceX, we complete that journey from beginning to end for the first time.

It started with acquiring hard-to-access private equity through the traditional private-market ecosystem. WLTH users were then able to participate in the economic exposure to that investment through a simple UX, with their positions governed through smart contracts. When the underlying investment moved into the public markets, we built the infrastructure to take it through that transition, receive the resulting fiat through our global banking infrastructure, convert those proceeds into stablecoins and return them on-chain. From there, our smart-contract vaults distribute the proceeds to users according to their respective economic interests, with the added bonus option to continue into the public equity on-chain.

Seeing that complete process working is particularly meaningful because it captures, in one investment flow, much of what we have spent the last few years building.

SpaceX is the most complete illustration of the model, although the story of WLTH is considerably broader. Users have participated in investments across more than 30 leading private companies through the platform, spanning technology, AI, defence, space and some of the other areas where extraordinary businesses are being created. Those investments have generally developed well, which is encouraging, but the more important achievement from our perspective has been proving repeatedly that the infrastructure can work.

Behind a purchase that might take a user a few minutes to make sits a surprisingly complicated network of brokers, investment vehicles, legal agreements, administrators, custodians, bank accounts, compliance processes and counterparties, often spread across several jurisdictions. Almost all of that infrastructure evolved to serve institutions, family offices and professional investors. Very little of it anticipated a world in which somebody might arrive with a digital wallet and expect to participate in a private company with the same simplicity they experience elsewhere online.

We had to find a way to bridge those worlds.

That involved establishing the corporate structures and international relationships required to purchase sought-after private equity, then working with forward-thinking legal and financial advisers to build an architecture around those assets that could support fractional economic participation through WLTH. On top of that came the digital infrastructure: wallets, smart contracts, settlement mechanisms and the systems required to administer users’ interests accurately and securely.

The Cook Islands framework provided the environment in which we were able to develop and operate this first iteration of WLTH. It allowed us to take an idea that existed on paper and discover what happened when it encountered real assets, real counterparties, real users and real money. Inevitably, some of the most valuable lessons came from the places where existing financial infrastructure was least equipped for what we were trying to do.

SpaceX eventually brought nearly all of those lessons together.

WLTH users originally gained access at a reference company valuation of approximately $470 billion. Acquiring the underlying exposure was itself a meaningful test of our sourcing and investment infrastructure, but the more interesting challenge emerged as the investment progressed towards the other side of the private-market lifecycle.

If we were serious about building a better way to participate in private markets, the infrastructure had to be capable of following an investment beyond the point of access. A liquidity event should not require the digital investment experience to suddenly end and hand the user back to a collection of disconnected traditional systems.

Solving that meant extending the infrastructure far beyond what a WLTH user would ever see. We established the relationships required to move the underlying investment through public-market infrastructure, the global banking arrangements required to receive fiat from the liquidation, and the conversion and settlement rails required to bring that value back on-chain. The final stage connects those proceeds with our smart-contract vaults so that they can be distributed programmatically according to the economic interests established when users originally participated.

What makes this particularly exciting to us is the completeness of the journey. We have spent years pushing at the boundaries between private markets and digital finance, but this is the first time we have been able to watch one investment travel through the entire architecture. Traditional private equity acquisition, fin-tech UX, smart-contract governance, a private-to-public transition, brokerage, banking, stablecoin settlement and programmatic distribution have all become parts of the same lifecycle.

There are businesses working on individual parts of this problem all over the world, and that activity has accelerated enormously. What we have been trying to understand through WLTH is how those components can eventually function as a coherent system. Completing the SpaceX journey gives us considerable confidence in the answer, while also giving us a much clearer understanding of what still needs to change. We are also confident that what we have achieved this week is constitutes a genuine first of its kind.

The real story is much bigger

Building WLTH in its current form has taught us an enormous amount about the boundaries of today’s financial infrastructure. We know where traditional legal structures add complexity, where banking and brokerage create friction, where custody becomes difficult, and where existing regulatory constructs were simply designed for a different generation of financial products. Our approach has always been to work carefully within those realities while pushing the experience as far forward as we responsibly could.

After more than 30 private-market investments and now a complete lifecycle with SpaceX, we have a fairly good view of where that boundary sits.

At the same time, the world around us has moved remarkably quickly. Stablecoins are becoming serious financial infrastructure. Tokenization has moved onto the strategic agenda of major banks, asset managers, exchanges and governments. Some of the world’s most important financial centres are thinking deeply about how ownership, custody and settlement should evolve, while private markets themselves continue to become a larger and more important part of global capital formation.

For a company that has spent years working precisely where those trends intersect, this creates an interesting moment.

Over the past year, we have found ourselves in increasingly serious conversations with people and institutions who are approaching these questions from a similar perspective. They have the regulatory sophistication to understand what needs to be protected, the ambition to reconsider infrastructure that can be improved, and the resources and long-term outlook required to build systems intended for global impact.

Those conversations have opened up an opportunity that we could not have pursued when WLTH began, because we had not yet accumulated the experience required to see it clearly. We now understand what works, what does not scale elegantly, and what becomes possible when the right technology, regulatory environment, institutional infrastructure and partners come together.

It is leading us towards an evolution of WLTH that is considerably more ambitious than the platform we have built so far.

There will be more to say about that soon. For the moment, completing the SpaceX journey feels like an appropriate point to reflect on the first chapter. We set out to find whether a new kind of private-market infrastructure could actually work, then spent several years building it across dozens of investments and learning from every constraint we encountered along the way.

SpaceX has allowed us to take that experiment all the way through.

What we learned getting here has become the foundation of our next chapter, one far bigger in scope. The result will reshape how private markets operate and a model for the rest of the world to strive to replicate.

Explore more about WLTH at WLTH.