BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS - NOVEMBER 19: Elon Musk gives a tour to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers of the control room before the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, a Trump confidante, has been tapped to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency alongside former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Tessera launched a tokenized exposure to SpaceX shares on Solana in February at an implied $800 billion valuation. As of late April it was trading at an implied valuation of more than $1.5 trillion, founder Chan Ahn said on the On The Margin podcast. Two months of trading have moved roughly $97 million in volume across fewer than 500 token holders. The number that matters is the second one. SpaceX is rumored to be eyeing an IPO at around $1.7 trillion. Tessera's market is already pricing the IPO before retail investors have ever been allowed to bid.

That is the headline number Chan Ahn keeps coming back to, and it is the reason institutional money is starting to take tokenization seriously. "I worked in companies like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan for many years on the structured derivatives," Ahn said. "And the one thing I noticed was the private market is where real alpha really lives. But it was always gate kept to top 0.1% through paperwork, minimum tickets and geography."

A second ex-Goldman trader, Yoon Auh, is wiring up the other half of the Wall Street tokenization stack from a different chain. In December, his company BOLTS Technologies launched a quantum-resilience pilot on Canton Network, the institutional blockchain that processes more than $4 trillion in repos a month and houses an estimated $6 trillion in real-world assets. Auh's pitch, in his own words on the same podcast: blockchains today force every asset to use the same cryptographic lock. He thinks that is the wrong design, and he has the patents to argue otherwise.

Tessera's product is structurally a loan. "I talked about the fact that we can offer T-tokens permissionlessly. The way the token is structured is what you call loan participation rights," Ahn said. The shares themselves sit in segregated portfolio companies in the Cayman Islands. Each token is one-to-one collateralized by an underlying SpaceX share, and the backing is published on-chain by a Chainlink Proof of Reserve feed. The structure carries a non-security legal opinion, which is what allows Tessera to skip KYC and offer the product permissionlessly to a Solana wallet.

The legal work was the hard part. "I think the hardest part of bringing real assets, real world assets like private equity on chain was really the legal and structuring part, getting the non-security legal opinion that actually holds up," Ahn said. "We settled on the loan participation rights through Cayman SPC because it maps cleanly onto the existing legal frameworks while giving us the programmability we need."

The second hard part was the oracle. Chainlink had to build a custom data feed for Tessera, a first for both companies. "When you move assets from off-chain to on-chain, it often involves a lot of trust. And a lot of RWA providers who tried before actually failed on that," Ahn said. The feed publishes the exact share count held in each Cayman SPC, verified by a financial auditor and pushed on-chain in real time. Investors can compare it against the circulating token supply at any time.

The economics are unusually retail-friendly. Traditional private-equity vehicles charge 10% to 20% on entry, 2% to 5% per annum and another 10% to 20% on exit. Tessera passes inventory through at cost and charges 0.2% on every trade, collected automatically through Solana's Token-2022 fee distribution standard. With $97 million in two-month volume, the project is "generating around a hundred thousand US dollar per month in gross revenue run rate," Ahn said. T-Kalshi launches in May. After that he is targeting Tether, Kraken, Anthropic and OpenAI as further tokenization candidates.

Auh's bet is that Wall Street's tokenized rails will not survive the next generation of cryptography unchanged. He spent decades inside the system, including a stint as a VP at Goldman Sachs in IT, and his diagnosis is that today's blockchains are stuck with one cryptographic lock per chain. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana all use the same elliptic-curve scheme on every transaction. When quantum computers break elliptic-curve cryptography, the locks on every coin and every token break at once.

QFlex, the protocol BOLTS is testing on Canton Network, lets each user pick a different lock per transaction. "Give the control of what type of lock, how many locks you want to put onto a particular transaction to the user at the wallet level. So bring your own locks, choose your own locks," Auh said in an interview on the On The Margin podcast. "On a per-transaction basis, if you wanted to. Therefore, it's an, you're turning this static problem into a dynamic problem."

The reasoning is the same as the one a private banker would give a billionaire client. "Why would you have the same level of protection for a hundred dollar asset in your wallet versus a hundred million dollar asset?" Auh said. The pilot, announced in December 2025, targets Canton's $6 trillion of real-world assets, the kind of money that cannot afford a Q-Day reset. Canton is hosted by R3-style institutional participants, not retail; the customer base for QFlex is overwhelmingly TradFi.

Auh frames the institutional appetite for proprietary security work bluntly. "TradFi has no problem paying license fees or anything that's proprietary because that's been the way of doing business forever," he said. "It's only like the hardcore blockchain systems where there's this notion that everything has to be open sourced for it to be safe."

Two ex-Goldman builders, two different chains, one investor profile. Ahn's product is for retail that wants exposure to private companies institutional gatekeepers reserve for themselves. Auh's product is for the institutions themselves, who need cryptography that survives the asset's lifetime. Both reject the implicit promise of public blockchain that one cryptographic standard plus one orderbook is enough.

Ahn's view of where the public-private market line gets drawn is direct. "The reason why we have a public and private market and sort of KYC and things like that, it actually goes deeper," he said. "What is important is the reason why we have the difference between the existence of public and private market and the reason why we have, if you like, very crude way of KYC for the investment, is because we didn't have good enough technology in place." His implication is that the technology is now in place. The CFTC, SEC and Federal Reserve are now coordinating on tokenized-asset oversight, treating the underlying products as technology-neutral.

Auh's framing of the same opening is structural. Bring your own locks today; bring your own anti-fraud rules tomorrow; bring your own settlement choices the day after that. "Let the user have whatever they want, whenever they want, let the blockchain handle all of that. And you no longer have that problem. But we've changed the power dynamic and the entire security dynamic of how blockchains work."

The skeptical question is whether either bet will compound at the speed the implied SpaceX number suggests. T-SpaceX trades round the clock; the underlying private shares do not. The Cayman SPC structure has not been litigated. Canton's $6 trillion in real-world assets has not yet faced a credible quantum attack. But the combined pitch from two former structured-derivatives traders is that the parts of Wall Street that have always wanted private markets and never wanted custody risk now have somewhere to go that is neither Bitcoin nor a JPMorgan vault.

I have written before on Wall Street’s appetite for crypto-native distribution channels: ICE put $2 billion into Polymarket; Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge; the stablecoin volume racing past ACH every month. Tokenization is the next leg, and the early shape of it does not look like a single chain winning. It looks like a Cayman SPC routed through Solana for retail and a “quantum-resilient” pilot routed through Canton for the trillions that already cannot afford to wait.