Man, Kaori

On February 8, 1971, NASDAQ came online。

There is no trade hall, a bell-calling ceremony, but a set of e-quota terminals linking off-site traders scattered across the United States into a network. New Haven's agent took a look. For 200 years, the rule in the stock trade was that you walk into the building, stand on the floor and shout at the price face to face. What can a screen change

Twenty years later, intel, Microsoft, apples were rebranded in NASDAQ, and the era of technology and equity changed Wall Street. NYU started catching up with Archipelago, an electronic trading platform acquired in 2006。

Twenty years later, in 2026, SpaceX is negotiating with NASDAQ to include NASDAQ 100 in 15 trading days. If you can't, you can go to New Haven。

On each occasion, the rules gave way to a force that was strong enough, but this time was different from before。

The rise of NASDAQ in 1971 was a new type of exchange that used technology to push old rules. The transition to the New York House in 2006 was the surrender of the old exchange to new technologies. In 2026, however, it was a company that had not yet been listed, requiring a 200-year-old market system to modify its processes。

It's not just about SpaceX, it's a cross-section of gravitational shifts in capital markets。

FINANCE WINDOW IS NO LONGER AN IPO PATENT

What's the point of listing? The answer to textbooks is financing。

The answer was correct in the 1990s. At that time, open markets were almost the only place that could provide large-scale long-term capital to enterprises. Soft money has not created vision funds, sovereign wealth funds do not touch science and technology units, and private markets are virtually non-existent. There is only one way to get real money: to ring the door of an exchange, to be audited, examined, priced and then pray for a smooth road。

MICROSOFT WAS LISTED IN NASDAQ ON 13 MARCH 1986 AND RAISED $61 MILLION AT A MARKET VALUE OF APPROXIMATELY $777 MILLION. THE COMPANY HAD LESS THAN $200 MILLION IN ANNUAL REVENUES. IT NEEDS THE MONEY TO EXPAND THE PRODUCT LINE, RECRUIT ENGINEERS AND SEIZE THE STANDARD STATUS OF THE PC OPERATING SYSTEM。

Forty years later, that logic is no longer the only answer。

The soft silver vision fund, Tigers Global, Coatue, a16z ... the institutional capital of an ecosystem as a whole pushes the amount of ammunition in the private market to an unprecedented scale. A company can grow to 50 billion or more on the private market without touching the open market。

Revolut is the most direct proof. On 24 November 2025, the London Digital Bank completed a second round of stock transfers, valued at $75 billion. Lead investors included Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Fidelity, and participants included a16z, Franklin Templeton, and even NVentures, a wind projector in Nvidia。

Income for the year 2024 was $4 billion, an increase of 72 per cent and pre-tax profits of $1.4 billion. CEO Nik Storonsky was asked about IPO's timetable and said, "We're building the world's first real global bank. IPO is not a priority。

What is the concept of $75 billion? This figure exceeds the market value of Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Lloyd Bank on the open market. A private company obtained higher pricing in private transactions than listed banks。

And more recently, there's news that Revolut is going to sell another second round of second-rate shares in late 2026, valued at $100 billion。

SpaceX completed a similar layout earlier, with private financing wheels covering all capital requirements for rocket development, satellite chain deployment and deep space exploration of three product lines. According to Reuters, SpaceX plans to value IPO at approximately 1.75 trillion dollars. If listed, it would be the largest IPO ever raised and would be the sixth largest market value in the U.S., second only to England, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet。

And Stripe, the paying company processed $1.9 trillion in transactions in 2025, an increase of 34 per cent over the same period. In February 2026, the value was $15.9 billion through a staff equity buy-back round. The co-founder, John Collison, spoke out loud: IPO is a "problem" for us。

The companies were not on the market, not because the market environment was bad, but because they no longer urgently needed open market money. Private markets provide the same size of capital, with fewer regulatory constraints and disclosure requirements。

But the fact that you don't need money doesn't mean you don't need to be listed。

Index. Real booty

Financing is only the first motivation for listing and the second is human mobility。

SpaceX has thousands of holding options and RSU employees inside, and the company has, over the past few years, pre-empted some of its employees through a type of offer, but this approach is limited in scale, frequency, and pricing is company-driven, not market-based。

The pipeline is too narrow for a company with tens of thousands of employees. The open market can provide real, sustained and market-pricing liquid exports。

The same pressure exists at the VC end. Revolut's list of shareholders is a16z, Fidelity, Coatue, and what these funds require is not an increase in paper valuation, but a real cash return. Private secondary markets can address part of the exit demand, but on a scale and with much less efficiency than open markets. The fund's due, the LP's gonna take the money and the paper's gonna be expensive。

SO THIS GROUP OF COMPANIES IS STILL ON THE MARKET, BUT THE COMBINATION OF VARIABLES DRIVING THE MARKET HAS CHANGED. THE NEED FOR FINANCING HAS FALLEN DRAMATICALLY, STAFF MOBILITY AND THE EXIT OF THE VC REMAIN IMMEDIATE, AND, ABOVE THESE TRADITIONAL MOTIVES, A STRUCTURAL FORCE THAT HAS BEEN UNDERESTIMATED BY MOST PEOPLE OVER THE PAST DECADE IS RAPIDLY INCREASING ITS WEIGHT。

In 1975, John Bogel created the first index fund for ordinary investors at the Pioneer Fund to track the Standard 500. Wall Street's reaction was a mockery. Active stock selection was professional, passive follow-up was a lazy strategy and no one was willing to buy a mediocre product。

Half a century later, the lazy won。

AS OF MARCH 2025, THE UNITED STATES PASSIVE FUNDS (INCLUDING MUTUAL FUNDS AND ETF) MANAGED ASSETS OF $1596 TRILLION, REPRESENTING 51 PER CENT OF ALL MUTUAL FUND INDUSTRY ASSETS, WHICH EXCEEDED ACTIVE FUNDS MANAGEMENT FOR THE FIRST TIME. THROUGHOUT 2025, THE U.S. ETF MARKET HAD A RECORD NET INFLOW OF $1.49 TRILLION, OF WHICH ETF, THE EQUITY CLASS, ABSORBED $923 BILLION。

There is a mechanical logic behind these figures. Once an equity is included in the index, all funds tracking the index must be configured in terms of weights. There is no subjective judgement, no waiting time and no forced buying. And as long as the company remains on the index, the fund will remain in stock。

It needs to be clarified that passive funds are price recipients and not price makers. The price of the stocks was still largely covered by active funding, with analysts studying, institutional traders playing, hedge funds betting。

BUT WHAT PASSIVE FUNDS DO IS EQUALLY CRUCIAL, PROVIDING A VAST, STABLE AND NON-DISCRETIONARY WAREHOUSEBOARD. THE CHASSIS WILL NOT BE SOLD IN A PANIC BECAUSE THE QUARTERLY FINANCIAL STATEMENTS ARE NOT AS EXPECTED, NOR WILL IT BE CUT OFF BECAUSE THE CEO HAS SENT A TWEET。

For companies like SpaceX, the value of this ballast is quantifiable。

SpaceX is expected to have a listing estimate of approximately $175 trillion, which will be placed directly into the top six of NASDAQ 100. Under the current rules, newly listed companies usually have to wait up to one year before being eligible for inclusion in key indices such as the Standard 500 or NASDAQ 100. This waiting period was intended to test the ability of companies to withstand liquidity pressures resulting from large-scale institutional purchases。

For SpaceX, however, this waiting period means that tracking NASDAQ 100 funds, including managing more than $40 billion Invesco QQQQ, will become unacceptable if one of the top 10 global market values cannot be configured for a year。

Pressure is not on SpaceX, on index funds themselves。

As a result, NASDAQ proposed the Fast Entry rule, which would expedite the listing of 15 transactions if the market value of the new listed company was ranked 40 in the top of the existing composition stock. This rule is still under approval, but NASDAQ itself acknowledges that it was designed to attract high-value private companies such as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI。

SpaceX uses rapid integration as a prerequisite for the selection of an exchange, and it has the bottom line, as the inherent demand of the passive index system gives it bargaining power。

if the core goal is indexing, why not do direct listening? direct access to the market saves the underwriting fee, which is equally high, and equal to the index。

The answer is size。

The IPO of SpaceX, which is expected to finance more than $25 billion, will need to create a sufficiently large roller on the first day of the market to meet the liquidity threshold for passive fund allocation. There are no new stock issues on the direct market, and the first-day circulation unit depends entirely on the extent to which existing shareholders are willing to sell. For a firm with a value of 1.75 trillion dollars, a passive fund would cause sharp price distortions if it were too small for the first day to complete the warehouse。

IPO was structured and distributed precisely as a tool to pave the way for large-scale passive financial entry. This logic in turn explains why Revolut and Stripe are not in a hurry。

Revolut's $75 billion goes into NASDAQ 100, with a limited weight and a disproportionate pass-through. There are other practical reasons for its delay, such as the fact that bank plates are still in the process of landing and management hopes to consolidate valuation narratives with additional quarterly profit data。

But the arithmetic of index weights is part of the calculation. Stripe's $15.9 billion valuation is not small, but John Collison says that IPO is not a priority and that the judgement behind it may be similar, and that the structural benefits of IPO will not be maximized until the valuation increases further and the weight of the index becomes more meaningful。

The listed value equation is being rewritten。

Financing is downgraded, staff mobility and VC exits are fundamental, and indexed investment leads to a sustainable chassis that is becoming a new variable in determining the timing of listing. It's not the only variable, but its weight has been rising over the last decade, and in SpaceX, for the first time, it's been openly at the negotiating table。

So, what's the role of the exchange in this game

By Hyperliquid

NASDAQ revised the index inclusion rules for a company that had not yet been listed。

In October 2025, the New York office's parent company, ICE, invested $2 billion in Polymarket, a projected market platform, with an estimated $8 billion. In March 2026, ICE obtained a seat on the Board of Directors with an additional $25 billion valued at the stocking of OKX。

These two things appear to be competitive strategies, and the bottom is the same anxiety: the scarcity of gatekeepers is disappearing。

There was an unwritten border between the New York House and NASDAQ. Traditional business goes to New York, technology and emerging industries go to NASDAQ. This border has been maintained for decades, with both sides maintaining a monopoly on their respective tracks。

This bond is now broken。

ICE SHARES OKX'S TRADING STRUCTURE DESERVES TO BE LOOKED AT. THE 120 MILLION USERS OF OKX WILL BE GRANTED ACCESS TO THE ICE UNITED STATES FUTURES MARKET, AS WELL AS TOKENIZATION TRANSACTIONS OF SHARES LISTED AT NEW YORK HOUSE. ICE OBTAINS OKX DATA ON THE REAL-TIME PRICING OF ENCRYPTED CURRENCY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF REGULATED ENCRYPTED FUTURES PRODUCTS。

ICE Vice-President Michael Blagrund put it bluntly that the future ICE competitors may not necessarily be traditional institutions like CME or NASDAQ, possibly DeFi protocols or super-applications. He named Robinwood and Uniswap。

A company with a New York office publicly admits that its future opponent may be a decentrized agreement. This statement is a sign in itself。

Polymarket has a similar investment logic. ICE is not buying a predictive market platform, it is buying a chain-based entry point for trading infrastructure. This cooperation includes institutional distribution of Polymarket data and future monetization projects。

In the 1990s, NASDAQ used electronic trading to pierce the New Haven's field monopoly. The weight shifted, but the pattern did not disappear. Today, the chain infrastructure is replicating the play, absorbing the share of derivatives and alternative assets on the edge of the exchange。

Hyperliquid provides the most specific cut。

The centralized exchange traded $2.95 trillion a year in 2025, with an average daily turnover of approximately $8.34 billion, earned $844 million a year and added more than 600,000 users. By reference, Coinbase traded approximately US$ 1.4 trillion over the same period. A chain agreement with no corporate entity and no CEO public appearances is twice as high as the transactions of NASDAQ-listed company Coinbase。

More noteworthy is the change in its user structure。

In 2025, Hyperliquid, through the HIP-3 agreement, launched a chain-long contract transaction for global stocks such as the Standard 500, NASDAQ Index, gold, crude oil, Inverda, Tesla, etc., with only seven of the 30 markets with the highest trading volume on the monetized platform track.xyz. On March 15, total HIP-3 market holdings reached a record high of US$ 14.33 billion, which increased by 100 times in six months, and the tede.xyz family ate 90 per cent。

In March, the escalation of the situation in the Middle East triggered sharp oil price fluctuations, with the traditional futures exchange on weekends and an influx of professional traders into Hyperliquid. This group is not a family, it is a professional futures dealer driven by 24/7 unstoppable, transparent chain and more efficient funds. As the traditional exchange continues to open up and close, the chain market has made the concept of "all-weather mobility" a fact。

THESE FIGURES AND THE CURRENT IPO BUSINESS OF THE EXCHANGE ARE NOT ON THE SAME TRACK, AND DIRECT COMPETITION BETWEEN THEM IS VERY LIMITED. BUT ICE'S CONCERN ISN'T TODAY, IS THE TREND。

When the chain infrastructure is able to carry the lasting contract trade in global stocks, when professional traders begin to hedge and speculate with chain tools, the liquidity of contemporary monetized stocks is moving closer to the traditional exchange, and the moat of the exchange is being bypassed a little bit。

Nuke chose to enter the stock chain, and NASDAQ chose to change its own rules. Two actions point to the same judgement: the era of monopolization ends, and active expansion is the only option。

End

In 1971, no one thought the NASDAQ EQ terminal was a threat. In 2006, no one thought that the agency would take the initiative to tear down its trading hall. In 2026, no one knew how far Hyperliquid and the chain infrastructure it represented would go。

However, after each rule had been compromised, the old pattern had not disappeared but had been re-tiered。

The New York House still exists today, is still strong and is no longer monopolized. NASDAQ will get stronger when SpaceX is on the market, and the unending chassis will continue to grow as the market value expands. The same is true of ICE investment OKX and Polymarket, which, if trade on the chain is inevitable, become an infrastructure supplier to the world on the chain, rather than waiting to be bypassed。

The system on the chain will not disappear and will even grow stronger and become a new infrastructure。

In a world where both systems coexist, where would the next big enough company with the bottom-line conditions knock? Or another question. Does it have to knock