Looking back at the previous cycle, the huge airdrops from Arbitrum, Optimism, Aptos and other major projects turned “ship the product first, issue the token later” into the default playbook. Before the TGE (Token Generation Event), large numbers of users were already helping build these ecosystems through interactions, staking, trading, testing and so on. Projects, in turn, used this activity to collect behavioral data, test product-market fit and strengthen their pitch when raising in the primary market. As this approach became mainstream, user contribution and incentive design in the pre-TGE phase started to look less like pure “engagement” and more like the early stages of asset formation, paving the way for today’s pre-market trading ecosystem.
At the same time, on-chain infrastructure kept maturing, issuance costs fell, and ultra-low-barrier tools such as Pump.fun lowered the bar for spinning up new tokens. The result was an explosion in token count and a constant dilution of market attention. The rise of meme coins drove the point home: in this environment, attention is often a stronger driver of price than fundamentals. For new projects, winning attention before TGE has effectively become a hard requirement.
Under that pressure, a number of pre-market asset mechanisms started to emerge:
Making points tradable led to the rise of OTC points platforms such as Whales Market.
Yield-tokenization protocols (such as Pendle) created new financial wrappers for airdrops and yield streams.
CEXs and OTC venues began offering pre-market spot trading.
Some exchanges launched pre-market perpetual contracts (for example, WLFI pre-launch perps on HTX).
Asset vouchers such as BuildKey provided a new way to trade token subscription rights.
Taken together, these mechanisms built a market that used to exist only behind closed doors between VCs and exchanges: the “in-between layer” sitting between primary and secondary markets. That layer has gradually evolved into what many now call the 1.5-level market, or simply the Pre-Market.
This is not a phenomenon unique to crypto. In mid-2024, for instance, Robinhood announced that it would offer EU users on-chain, tokenized exposure to private company equity such as OpenAI and SpaceX [1], reflecting strong retail demand for early-stage assets. In essence, the growth of the pre-market is a restructuring of what used to be a very closed capital flow chain.
As a result, pre-TGE trading is no longer a side show or a temporary gimmick. It has become a clearly defined layer of the market. Its influence goes far beyond “more ways to speculate”:
it changes how projects launch,
it reshapes token distribution over time,
it alters the listing pathways on exchanges, and
it rewrites the logic of how early liquidity is created.
Against this backdrop, this report focuses on a few core questions:
Is pre-market trading reshaping the way projects issue tokens?
Is it changing how exchanges design their listing systems?
Does the pre-market have the ingredients to become a scalable, standalone “new market”?
Can users realistically achieve measurable risk–return profiles at an earlier stage?
The following sections explore these questions and offer some forward-looking observations.
II. Three Value-Anchoring Paths for Pre-Market Assets
Assets that trade before TGE do not come in a single, neat format. They form a layered structure built from different sources, logics and settlement methods. Without some systematic classification, it becomes very hard to discuss price formation, settlement, project incentives and participant behavior within a coherent framework.
Rather than slicing everything up purely by “product type”, this report groups pre-market assets into three broad categories based on how their future value is anchored. That perspective tracks more closely with how trades actually work in practice and makes it easier to understand what each type of asset is doing during the pre-market phase.
Token-value-anchored assets
These revolve around future token value and include pre-market OTC deals, pre-market spot and pre-market perpetual contracts. In all of these, the underlying exposure ultimately points to either the token itself or its expected price after listing. Among pre-market assets, this group has the most direct link to the future spot market.
Points-anchored assets
These are built around points systems, which later become the basis for airdrops. They include the points themselves, the tradability of those points, and the additional claims that appear when yields are split and mapped back to points (for example, “points-mapped yield rights”). Under today’s airdrop-driven tokenomics, this category carries user contribution, behavioral incentives and airdrop expectations, and is often the earliest expression of assetized expectations in the pre-market.
Rights-anchored assets
These focus on future rights and typically show up as NFTs, access passes, or BuildKey-style vouchers. They package non-standard entitlements—whitelist spots, testing slots, early access, or future token allocations—into tradable units. What they represent is not yield or token exposure directly, but a set of future redeemable rights that have been clearly assigned.
Compared with a more traditional “by product” classification, this three-way split better highlights how the pre-market spans multiple chains:
a token-value chain that concentrates price discovery,
a points chain that drives user growth and early incentives, and
a rights chain that handles distribution logic and entitlement assignment from the project’s perspective.
Once this basic structure is in place, we can go a level deeper. In the next section, each category is examined in turn: how it came about, how it trades, how prices are formed, and what typical examples look like.
III. Three Classic Pre-Market Trading Types and Case Studies
Section II outlined a way to think about pre-market assets based on the way their future value is anchored. Building on that, this section looks at the mechanics. Starting from representative products, it breaks down:
how each type of asset is generated,
how the trading structure works,
how prices are formed, and
how risk is transmitted.
Real cases are used to show how these assets behave in the wild and how “marketized” they actually are, giving a clearer view of what the pre-market looks like in the current cycle.
1. Token-Type Pre-Market Assets: Trading on Future Tokens and Future Prices
Within the pre-market ecosystem, the chain centered on future token value is the most liquid, the closest to genuine price discovery, and the most directly linked to a project’s performance after listing. Based on how trades are carried out and the state of the token at the time, this category usually includes:
OTC transactions,
pre-market spot directed by exchanges (for example, Binance pre-market spot and Gate Pre-Token), and
pre-market perpetual futures
What they all have in common is that the underlying exposure ultimately points to the token or its expected post-listing price. Using different matching, margin and collateral setups, they effectively pull the future spot market forward into the pre-market window.
(1) Pre-Market OTC
Pre-market OTC trades behave a lot like conventional OTC deals: they are peer-to-peer transactions with a platform standing in the middle as guarantor. There are both centralized and decentralized versions. On the decentralized side, Whales.Market has become one of the main venues; on the centralized side, CEXs dominate.
By late 2025, several exchanges including Bitget, MEXC and Gate had launched their own pre-market OTC offerings. Volumes tended to concentrate in large airdrop projects and hot narrative assets—for example, earlier WLFI trading and popular TON mini-game tokens.
The heart of this model is the collateral arrangement. Both sides must lock up some assets before an order goes live, so that settlement can actually be enforced:
When a buyer submits an order, an equivalent amount of stablecoins is frozen in their account until settlement is finished.
The seller must lock the future deliverable tokens or equivalent assets according to the platform’s specified collateral rate.
Once an order is matched, it moves into a settlement phase. In that window, sellers must transfer the agreed tokens to buyers, and buyers must pay on time. If a seller misses the deadline, all or part of their collateral may be confiscated and paid out to the buyer. In a scenario where the token lists at a much higher price than the pre-market level, the buyer’s theoretical maximum upside is roughly 100% (before fees).
The platform usually spells out key timings in advance: when pre-market trading ends, when settlement begins and when spot trading officially opens. Participants who do not have the necessary assets ready by those cut-off times risk having collateral deducted for failing to settle. In other words, buyers in pre-market spot are typically exposed to a maximum gain/loss of around 100% (ignoring fees), while sellers can use the mechanism to lock in profits ahead of listing—or, in extreme cases, choose to walk away from the contract if the economics justify a default.
(2) Pre-Market Spot Trading
Pre-market spot is essentially regular spot trading shifted forward in time, with a few extra guardrails such as position limits and staking requirements. At present, it is mainly seen on Binance and Gate.io.
Binance – Pre-Market Spot
Binance has run pre-market spot trading for at least two projects: Scroll (SCR) and Usual (USUAL). Scroll, a zkEVM rollup, was valued at around USD 1.8 billion in 2023, and 5.5% of its total token supply was allocated through Launchpool.
On 11 October, at 18:00, Binance opened pre-market trading in SCR and capped individual positions at 2,500 SCR (about 5 BNB). From one hour before pre-market trading began until after it ended, deposits and internal transfers for SCR were paused. Normal deposit/transfer functions were restored only once pre-market spot closed, and withdrawals opened 24 hours after SCR went live on the Binance spot market [2].
In practical terms, aside from these limits, the trading experience was nearly indistinguishable from standard spot. During the 10-day pre-market window, first-day volume exceeded USD 40 million. After that, activity slowed materially, and most days saw volume of about USD 2 million.
The second case, USUAL, allocated 7.5% of total supply via Launchpool. Pre-market trading opened on 19 November 2024 at 18:00 (ten hours after Launchpool ended) and closed on 17 December 2024 at 17:00. Price action followed a similar pattern: an initial uptrend in price followed by weaker trading volumes.
Importantly, while Binance was running pre-market spot for these assets, other CEXs did not list spot pairs for them. In practice, Binance became the only venue where larger capital could gain spot exposure to these tokens. With a very large user base and relatively small float, pre-market pricing leaned heavily in favor of sellers, as tight supply and intense attention pushed prices higher.
It is also clear that this is not a model that every exchange can copy. The product is possible only because of Binance’s dominant position and strong leverage in listing negotiations. From the price charts, users who entered via Launchpool and sold into pre-market spot had a relatively high chance of making a profit. For projects and broader communities, however, pre-market spot is not necessarily ideal:
Prices can easily be bid up in a thin-float, high-attention environment, setting the stage for a “spike then fade” pattern after listing.
Pre-market sets expectations early, leaving less narrative room before TGE.
The mechanism tends to favor Launchpool participants and larger holders, rather than regular community users, making expectation management harder.
It may be for these reasons that Binance has so far only experimented with pre-market spot on a very limited set of projects.
Gate – Pre-Token
Gate’s Pre-Token approach is conceptually similar but implemented differently. It is a stake-and-mint system. Users stake USDT to mint Pre-Tokens, which represent claims in pre-market trading. These Pre-Tokens cannot be deposited, withdrawn or transferred on-chain, but they can be freely traded in Gate’s spot market. Users who prefer not to mint can simply buy them from others.
Before pre-market trading ends, Gate shuts down both minting and the pre-market spot market. At that point, the system takes a snapshot of all Pre-Token holders, clears out token balances and moves into settlement.
For minters: they must acquire and deliver the real tokens during the settlement window. Once they have delivered successfully, the USDT they staked is returned to their spot or unified account. Failure to deliver results in a loss of the staked USDT.
For traders: they can sell their Pre-Tokens before the market closes to lock in profits or hold them through to settlement. After settlement, the system distributes the real tokens delivered by minters, plus a proportional share of any collateral from minters who failed to deliver [3].
By early December 2025, Gate had supported 19 projects through Pre-Token. For most of them, the number of minters was in the hundreds. Telegram mini-game tokens have been particularly popular: for example, HMSTR attracted about 1,400 minters and more than USD 5.4 million in staked USDT, while DOGS reached nearly USD 10 million in stake from 1,331 minters [4].
Because not all tokens are always delivered in full, the undelivered portion is pooled as a default collateral pool, which the system distributes to Pre-Token holders. In practice, this often means a holder ends up with slightly fewer real tokens than the number of Pre-Tokens they held, but receives extra stablecoins as compensation.
Gate’s design offers buyers a basic guarantee that “there will be tokens”, while giving projects and large holders a convenient way to conduct something very close to a pre-spot listing entirely within the exchange, without the friction of moving to external platforms.
(3) Pre-Market Perpetual Futures
Pre-market perpetuals (often called pre-launch futures) are another step along the same path: they allow users to trade a token’s price before it appears on spot markets. Instead of being anchored to live spot prices, these contracts reference a future spot price, and are traded via margin and limited leverage.
HTX’s WLFI/USDT linear perpetual was one such example. It gave users a way to position ahead of WLFI’s listing and express a view on its eventual price and liquidity.
These contracts are usually listed in the days or weeks before TGE is expected to take place. Compared with more mature perpetual markets, pre-market perps rely more on expectations, available liquidity and order book depth. Funding rates often stay relatively fixed, and exchanges tend to cap leverage in the 3x–10x range to constrain risk.
Before listing, these instruments can, in theory, provide a strong price discovery signal. In practice, however, they also come with higher information risk, liquidity risk and settlement uncertainty. Monad—a recently launched L1—is a good example. Across several platforms, MON’s pre-market perp volumes and depth did not reflect its status as a flagship L1. Relative to blue-chip perp markets on the same exchanges, and compared with its volumes after spot listing, pre-market liquidity remained thin. That “underwhelming reality” points to a ceiling on how much pre-market perps can realistically do at this stage.
There have also been clear instances of manipulation. On Hyperliquid, for example, XPL–USDC perps were listed with up to 3x leverage and priced via an internal oracle with no external reference or strict open interest caps. On 26 August, a single whale market-bought around 15.2 million XPL, wiping out the order book and pushing the price from USD 0.60 to USD 1.80 in one move. Hyperliquid’s mark price followed the internal oracle up to USD 1.80, while external markets still traded at USD 0.60. The 200% gap triggered mass liquidations on the short side, with estimated losses around USD 50 million [5]. It was a sharp lesson in how fragile ill-designed pre-market derivative venues can be.
2. Points-Type Pre-Market Assets: User Behavior Points and Their Financial Offshoots
Because points are inherently quantifiable, early trading of points often started in small, closed communities with third-party escrow. As appetite grew, platforms like Whales Market began using smart contracts to hold collateral and match orders, gradually forming a standardized points OTC market. In this setup, both sides typically settle in stablecoins, and after TGE the platform distributes whatever airdrop rewards are due to buyers based on the project’s official rules.
The central problem is that points do not map linearly to value. How much they’re “worth” depends heavily on the final airdrop formula. If the project uses thresholds or multiplier tiers, the points sold in a trade might not correspond one-to-one with actual rewards.
For example:
User A has 200,000 points and sells 50,000.
The rules say: rewards start at 100,000 points; 200,000 points earn double rewards.
In that case, should the buyer’s 50,000 points be treated as:
below the minimum threshold (so no reward), or
part of the “double” tranche that previously belonged to User A?
That ambiguity makes pricing extremely difficult.
Pendle offers an elegant workaround. Pendle itself doesn’t airdrop tokens or directly trade points, but its yield-tokenization design—especially the YT (Yield Token)—fits naturally with other projects’ points/airdrop schemes, effectively creating a kind of “airdrop leverage”.
Here’s how it works in practice:
Users deposit yield-bearing assets (such as stETH, eETH, rsETH) into Pendle.
These are wrapped into standardized SY (standardized yield tokens).
SY is then split into:
PT (Principal Token) – representing the principal, and
YT (Yield Token) – representing future yield.
In many newer protocols that rely on points-based airdrops—for example Ether.fi, Renzo and Karak—on-chain “yield-generating behavior” is one of the main metrics used to assign points. That means addresses holding YT are often treated as contributors, and are rewarded with points or airdrops based on how much YT they hold and for how long.
In simple terms, if you hold YT:
you still receive yield from the underlying asset, and
you may also earn extra airdrop points thanks to that holding behavior.
This turns YT into an “airdrop-qualification asset”. Many users buy YT primarily to farm airdrops rather than to harvest yield.
As this setup matured, Pendle became an important hub in the pre-market asset ecosystem. It transforms previously closed “yield rights” into tradable, stackable “contribution credentials”, tying together yield, points and liquidity.
Daily volume data illustrate this quite clearly: trading volume for airdrop-related assets on Pendle frequently exceeds USD 3 million, and in favorable conditions can climb past USD 10 million. The resilience of this liquidity comes from Pendle’s dual liquidity engines:
AMM engine – When a yield-bearing SY is split into PT and YT, the AMM pool offers liquidity between PT and SY. Users can trade PT directly or obtain YT through a flash-swap mechanism, all inside a single pool [6].
Order-book engine – This layer complements the AMM by providing better depth and price granularity. Orders can be placed not only at specific prices but also at a desired implied APY, which creates a more nuanced pricing surface [7].
Deep liquidity then feeds into composability. Other protocols can build on top; PT can be traded in pools, used as collateral in lending, or integrated into structured products.
Even so, the model has clear limits:
It fits best with DeFi-native protocols where user contribution can be mirrored through on-chain financial flows. Many other projects have no natural way to translate “points” into DeFi positions.
Regardless of multipliers or reward tiers attached to YT, the final reward still depends on each project’s own airdrop rules. Pendle can smooth the mapping, but it cannot remove the structural uncertainty inherent in points-based assets.
Similar protocols have appeared, each with its own twist—RateX adds leverage, Spectra lets communities spin up their own markets, and so on. But in terms of actual usage, liquidity, and brand recognition, Pendle remains the flagship protocol in this niche.
3. Rights-Type Pre-Market Assets: Redeemable Entitlements, Including Future Tokens
In many gaming, social and application projects, early NFTs, in-game items or access passes often play a role in airdrop allocation. In other words, these assets are not just cosmetic or functional; they carry implicit future token redemption rights.
Because projects rarely define these rules cleanly at the outset, such “early credentials” usually face two recurring problems:
Their non-standard nature makes them hard to price and reduces liquidity.
Teams may revise the rules later—or in some cases walk back soft promises—leaving the value of these credentials uncertain.
From the project’s point of view, the goal of an airdrop is not to “spread tokens evenly”, but to direct scarce resources toward users who are valuable over the long term. Traditional NFTs or one-off “task passes” aren’t very good at expressing this; they’re too coarse to distinguish between genuine contributors and opportunists, and they rarely give the market a clear, early signal of value.
Aspecta addresses this by abstracting those early, messy credentials into a more standardized, tradable unit: the BuildKey. In this model, NFTs, pre-TGE passes and similar objects are wrapped into on-chain vouchers that can trade in a transparent, liquid environment. For pre-market trading, this amounts to tokenizing airdrop expectations—letting “future rights to yield” enter price discovery in advance.
Aspecta’s BuildKey system is built around four core modules:
Pricing & Trading
Supports multiple methods—bonding curves, order books, auctions—enabling genuine on-chain price discovery early on. What used to be a hazy OTC quote becomes a verifiable, traceable price formation process.
Gated Distribution & KYC
Lets teams set different eligibility layers during issuance. They can segment KYC’d users, developers, KOLs and core contributors; issue publicly or via whitelists; and balance compliance requirements with the need to reward early adopters.
Customized Utility
Through programmable contracts, BuildKeys can carry more than just a future redemption right. They can embed governance, staking hooks, access control, or ecosystem-point functionality. That gives them intrinsic utility even before tokens exist.
Shared Liquidity for Multiple Assets
Allows several projects to share the same liquidity pool. This improves capital efficiency and allows a degree of cross-asset price discovery, mitigating the distortions caused by very shallow, project-specific pools.
As of 8 December 2025, Aspecta had listed 29 assets. Apart from River, which amassed roughly USD 110.41 million in trading liquidity, most assets see volumes in the USD 1–3 million range—already ahead of many traditional pre-market OTC venues. In effect, BuildKeys have given rise to a standalone pre-market trading venue with a reasonably scalable asset structure [8].
Figure 12: Aspecta Asset Trading Volume, Source: Compiled from Official Website, 8 Dec 2025
They have also produced noticeable wealth effects. Sphere X has seen returns above 11,000%, while even the weakest performer, Pandatitan, posted gains above 140%. Community discussions on X and in various groups suggest that many participants now treat Aspecta as a kind of early-stage launchpad, where they rush to buy BuildKeys in initial offerings.
Figure 13: Partial Dataset of Listed Assets on Aspecta, Source: Aspecta Official Website, 8 Dec 2025
Since BuildKey offerings usually disclose—in advance—the range of tokens each voucher will be redeemable for (subject to later adjustment), there is real price competition in the pre-market phase. That, however, naturally pulls in speculative flows.
In summary, entitlement vouchers currently form the most broadly applicable pre-market mechanism. They work for both large and small teams, and their advantages are clear:
relatively unified structure
high composability
improved liquidity
better alignment between what projects want and what users are looking for
That said, the industry has not yet converged on a single standard. Different projects define “redeemable rights” in different ways. Aspecta’s BuildKey is one promising template, but whether it becomes a shared standard is still an open question.
On the business side, Aspecta charges a 2.5% trading fee on BuildKey transactions [9], with discounts in some cases, while its pricing framework for project teams remains somewhat flexible. In effect, teams are trading underpriced token rights today for:
earlier, market-based price discovery,
broader and faster community reach, and
stronger wealth effects around their launch.
This trade-off helps explain why the model continues to draw both issuers and traders.
4. An Emerging Front: Prediction Markets in Pre-Market Trading
Prediction markets are arguably the most experimental part of the current pre-market stack. Unlike voucher models (presales, BuildKeys) that focus on rights, prediction markets use event outcomes as the underlying asset. Participants bet on things like:
listing dates,
FDV bands,
airdrop sizes,
unlock schedules,
and so on. They do not trade tokens or vouchers directly, but instead express views on future valuation and timing via probabilities and capital flows.That makes them particularly useful for very early-stage projects where tokenomics are still undefined and valuation is fluid.
On the time axis, most of the pre-market mechanisms discussed so far appear in the mid-to-late stage of a project, often close to TGE. Prediction markets push price discovery much earlier. While the project is still in the concept or fundraising stage, events can already be created around it, and capital can begin to cluster there.
Figure 14: Prediction Events on Monad’s Launch Across Polymarket and Kalshi, Source: Polymarket Analytics, 8 Dec, 2025
Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi have already listed events tied to high-profile projects like Monad: when they’ll launch and what FDV they might achieve. Both platforms now maintain Pre-Market sections within their crypto categories, focusing on airdrop schedules, TGE timing and valuation bands.
One of the most active examples on Polymarket is a market predicting Lighter’s FDV on the day after listing. As of 8 December 2025, cumulative volume in that market had reached about USD 16 million, with the probability of “FDV > USD 1 billion” around 70%, and “FDV > USD 4 billion” roughly 37% [10]. The way capital is distributed across these brackets effectively draws an early valuation curve for the project.
From a project team perspective, prediction markets offer a way to collect genuine market signals without having to issue tokens or NFTs. These signals can inform:
internal valuation ranges,
how much liquidity to seed, and
when and how aggressively to run marketing.
From a user perspective, prediction markets offer a way to participate in the pre-market without holding any vouchers. Users can express a view on valuation, hedge risk, or position for a potential payoff long before tokens exist.
For that reason, prediction markets can be seen as the front-most layer of pre-market trading. Their structures are light-weight, barriers to entry are relatively low, and they bring forward the moment when the market begins to “price” the project.
However, they are also highly dependent on oracles and event resolution. Outcomes usually rely on third-party data or team announcements, and in some cases, the same party that creates or promotes an event has influence over its resolution. That opens the door to manipulation and sharp information asymmetries.
Recent examples shared by HTX Research highlight this:
In November 2025, a rumor spread on X that OpenSea would launch a token before 31 December. The probability of that outcome on Polymarket surged from under 2% to above 30%, only to crash back into single digits after the team denied the rumor. Traders who chased the move based purely on social media headlines suffered heavy losses.
In another case, decisions by the Monad team—such as opening the airdrop portal and postponing TGE—directly reshaped market odds, underlining how much control teams have over the underlying events.
Some prediction markets also use ambiguous rules. Terms like “launch”, the choice of reference venue for price, or how FDV is calculated can be interpreted multiple ways. Skilled traders can sometimes exploit these grey areas. MetaDAO’s prediction around Solomon’s fundraising size, for example, saw large early bets and abrupt shifts in the final outcome, sparking debate about whether some participants had an information edge.
Taken together, these cases suggest that prediction markets today are not yet full-fledged “truth machines” for events. They’re closer to highly specialized betting arenas where those with better information or deeper pockets often have the upper hand.
For ordinary participants, that means:
carefully checking who created the event and who stands to benefit,
reading the rules and resolution criteria in detail,
cross-checking information across platforms, and
watching on-chain wallet behavior and liquidity flows, before placing sizeable bets.
Prediction markets are still valuable as a forward-looking participation channel in the pre-market, but the reliability of their signals will depend on more transparent oracles and gradually more robust governance [11].
IV. Can the Pre-Market Ecosystem Scale?
1. How Big Can It Get?
At this point, pre-market trading is no longer a niche corner of the crypto market. It is evolving into a stable and fast-growing segment.
Current data indicate that the largest volumes come from three main areas:
pre-market perpetual contracts,
pre-market spot markets (especially on Binance), and
yield-trading protocols that are tightly tied to airdrops (such as Pendle).
The most flexible and broadly applicable mechanism remains pre-market OTC, while Aspecta’s rights-voucher model has already exceeded many traditional OTC platforms in both trading volume and wealth effects, making it a new center of growth.
Figure 15: Overview of Pre-Market Trading Ecosystem Data, Source: Compiled from Official Websites and Multiple Channels, 16 Nov 2025
According to RootData, between 1 January 2023 and 8 December 2025 there were:
1,351 fundraising rounds of at least USD 3 million for projects that had not yet issued tokens, of which
540 were deals of at least USD 10 million.
After removing repeat rounds, there are still hundreds of medium-to-large projects and several dozen true “flagships” (such as Monad) waiting to launch [12].
If we combine those figures with the trading behavior we see in representative names, a big project can easily generate around USD 100 million in pre-market trading. For the very top tier, such as WLFI or Monad, total pre-market turnover can exceed USD 1 billion.
In other words, the pre-market has already become a multi-billion-dollar market in its own right, with clear room to expand. Whether it can grow into the tens or hundreds of billions depends less on the number of projects and more on how far it can go along the path of institutionalization and standardization.
2. What Makes Scaling Difficult?
Project count alone does not determine how far the pre-market can grow. To move from a few billion dollars in activity to a much larger, durable market, the ecosystem needs to address a more fundamental question:
Does the existing pre-market model have enough capacity to bear risk?
Looking back across the cases discussed, we find that nearly all pre-market trading structures concentrate risk in two main areas:
Market structure risk, and
Settlement and information asymmetry.
Each of these affects users, project teams, platforms (CEXs, OTC desks, protocols) and market makers in different ways.
Type 1: Market Structure Risk
By design, pre-market venues tend to have:
thinner liquidity,
shallower order books,
fewer mature market makers, and
less robust, multi-source pricing.
Prices therefore lean heavily on expectations, not on a well-balanced supply–demand equilibrium. A single large order can move the market, making large swings, slippage spikes and outright manipulation more likely. The Hyperliquid XPL event—where a single whale trade blew the order book out and triggered mass liquidations—is a textbook case.
Implications:
For users – It becomes harder to judge what a “fair” price is. In violent moves, users can be stopped out or forced to add margin at very unfavorable levels.
For project teams – Extreme pricing distorts expectations, can provoke community backlash, and may damage how the project is perceived once it lists.
For platforms – Sharp volatility amplifies the strain on risk engines, funding mechanisms and reputational capital.
For market makers – Shallow depth and noisy information make it hard to run stable strategies; capital requirements and risk are higher than on established spot or perp markets.
Type 2: Settlement Risk and Information Asymmetry
The eventual realization of pre-market assets rests, almost entirely, on project teams. Parameters like TGE timing, first-day circulating supply, airdrop rules and distribution pace are often not fully locked in—and may change.
Implications:
For users – Points, vouchers or pre-market positions that looked promising can suddenly lose value if rules are tweaked, deadlines moved or mechanics rewritten.
For project teams – Changing the rules or dragging out settlement can rapidly erode trust, complicate listing negotiations and weaken long-term community cohesion.
For platforms – Any default, delay or abrupt rule change by a project is immediately externalized onto the platform. Exchanges or protocols must deal with compensation, PR, risk management and user expectations.
For market makers – Because teams hold privileged information about institutional allocations, market-making deals and circulating supply, market makers can be blindsided by sudden changes that alter their risk exposure.
It’s also clear that no single actor can fix this—for example, a CEX can’t solve it alone, nor can any one project or user cohort. For pre-market trading to become truly institutional, the industry needs some form of shared governance framework in the pre-issuance phase.
In the context of Web3, that is not easy. Openness and pseudonymity give project teams a lot of freedom, and without stronger norms or incentives, soft rugs and last-minute rule changes are likely to persist. Information asymmetry is almost baked into the system.
This is why pre-market risk is, at its core, a governance and incentive problem, not just a technical one. Project teams have little natural incentive to accept strict constraints, platforms lack unified standards, and users typically sit at a disadvantage in terms of information.
Even so, as pre-market trading continues to move in a more professional direction, a basic consensus is emerging: only when projects, exchanges, on-chain infra providers and market makers work together to establish:
clear, verifiable disclosure standards,
traceable pricing mechanisms, and
enforceable settlement rules
can the pre-market evolve from a “black box of trust” into something more structurally transparent.
It is a difficult transition, but in the long run, strong economic incentives make it hard to avoid.
V. Outlook and Conclusion
With funding tougher to secure, TGE timelines stretching out and points-based operations turning into standard practice, the pre-issuance phase is fast becoming a central battleground for project teams, users, and trading platforms. The expansion of the pre-market ecosystem can be read as the overlap of three forces in the same time window:
Projects want to raise earlier and build a user base before launch.
Users want to lock in upside or manage risk earlier.
Platforms and market makers want new entry points for liquidity and price discovery.
From a structural angle, the pre-market is evolving along three visible lines:
Liquidity and price discovery are shifting earlier in time.
For hot projects, pre-market trading volumes, position structures and price gaps are already strong enough to influence first-day performance. In many cases, pre-market prices now function as a de facto opening level, while listing has become primarily a liquidity event.
Pre-market assets are becoming more layered and systematized.
Products tied to future token value (OTC, pre-market spot, pre-market perps) concentrate price discovery.
Points trading and yield-splitting systems carry user incentives and help filter contributions.
Voucherized entitlements convert whitelists, allocations and access rights into tradable claims.
Collectively, these three paths create a front-loaded market structure that covers:
· value validation,
· participation stratification,
· expectation management, and
· early liquidity anchoring.
The function of exchanges is being rewritten.
Pre-market activity gradually externalizes what used to be the exclusive domain of CEXs—first price, first liquidity, first access—onto on-chain venues, OTC markets and derivative platforms. For exchanges that adapt, this is less a loss of power and more an opportunity to extend their value chain forward into the pre-issuance stage, rather than just competing at listing.
Returning to the four guiding questions from the beginning, we can now offer a more concrete set of answers:
1) Is pre-market trading reshaping how projects issue tokens? Answer: Yes—structurally, and likely irreversibly.
With funding under pressure, points-based operation becoming the norm and TGE cycles lengthening, projects are moving from a model of “launch token, then start building” to one that looks more like:
incentivize → price → issue
Pre-market trading lets teams complete user screening, market-based pricing and liquidity warm-up before TGE. Issuance is no longer a single moment but part of a staged process. Launch paths are evolving from one-step issuance into a phased “points → pre-market → TGE” structure.
2) Is pre-market trading changing how exchanges design their listing systems? Answer: Yes—but more by extending them than by replacing them.
Pre-market mechanisms do erode exchanges’ exclusive grip on initial price discovery. At the same time, they create space for exchanges to move into earlier stages—the points phase, the voucher phase and the pre-market itself.
For CEXs that choose to participate, the pre-market is not simply a threat. It is a way to build a longer value chain, spanning:
early user engagement,
pre-market matching and risk management, and
final settlement and listing.
Listing starts to look less like the birth of liquidity and more like a node where prior expectations are crystallized.
3) Does the pre-market have the ingredients to become a scalable “new market”? Answer: The basic shape is there; whether it breaks the scale ceiling depends on institutionalization.
Structurally, the pre-market has already moved beyond a single product category:
one chain around token expectations,
one around assetized points, and
one around voucherized rights.
Data show that major projects can generate USD 100 million to 1 billion in pre-market trading individually. With hundreds of projects yet to issue, the pre-market is already a stable multi-billion-dollar market. Breaking through into a much larger, durable segment will hinge on building a cross-entity trust framework that can support higher levels of risk.
4) Can users achieve measurable risk–return profiles at earlier stages? Answer: They can—but only if they understand the specific risks of each pre-market product and their own tolerance.
Pre-market perps, OTC deals, yield-tokenization (PT/YT) and BuildKey vouchers all allow users to take explicit positions before TGE. Through:
price differentials,
yield rights, and
redemption rights,
users can construct quantifiable early exposures rather than relying on vague promises or lottery-style airdrops. This is a big step forward from earlier cycles, where participation before TGE was mostly about interactions or “points farming” with uncertain payoff.
Of course, the trade-off is that users must also bear:
market structure risk,
counterparty and settlement risk, and
information asymmetry.
Those who understand these trade-offs, size positions carefully and choose venues with stronger governance are better placed to benefit from the shift.
Final Thoughts
The pre-market is not just another speculative gimmick that will vanish with the next cycle. It is shaping up to be a foundational layer of the Web3 market structure—sitting between primary and secondary, and increasingly integrated into both.
It is:
reshaping how projects think about launching and distributing tokens,
pushing exchanges to rethink their product stacks and timelines, and
giving users new ways to participate, for better or worse, earlier in the lifecycle.
As standards mature and more robust governance is put in place, it is reasonable to expect the pre-market to evolve from today’s patchwork of platforms and products into a more cohesive, institutionalized “Pre-market” that will be a fixture of the next crypto cycle rather than a footnote.
References
[1] Robinhood shares soar as new crypto stock tokens open doors to overseas investors – MarketWatch
[2] https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/support/faq/detail/d4c5afbf4b804c63908a63d760be97f9?ref=P6CD65KX?ref=P6CD65KX[3] https://www.gate.com/zh/help/pre-market-trading/pre-market/39269/gate.io-pre-market-trading-premint-faq[4] https://www.gate.com/zh/premint[5] Whale Trades on Hyperliquid Wipe Out XPL Order Book Triggering Mass Liquidations – The Defiant
[6] https://docs.pendle.finance/pendle-v2/ProtocolMechanics/LiquidityEngines/AMM[7] https://docs.pendle.finance/pendle-v2/ProtocolMechanics/LiquidityEngines/OrderBook[8] https://trade.aspecta.ai/[9] https://docs.aspecta.ai/buildkey/fees-and-benefits[10] https://polymarket.com/event/lighter-market-cap-fdv-one-day-after-launch?tid=1763370628411[11] https://x.com/HTX_Research/status/1996150070316838989[12] https://cn.rootdata.com/Fundraising
Author: Wayne Zhang / X: @Wayne13yao
Reviewer: Andy Liu / X: @alxy_777
Disclaimer
This report has been independently prepared by the research department based on publicly available information, market data and industry interviews. It is intended solely for academic and industry research purposes and does not constitute investment advice, legal opinion or trading guidance. Any projects, platforms, tokens, points, vouchers, contracts or other digital assets referenced in this report are cited only for the purpose of analysis and discussion, and do not represent any explicit or implicit guarantee by the institution regarding their legality, regulatory status or future performance.
The legal characterization of mechanisms such as pre-market trading, asset redemption vouchers, points assetization and prediction markets varies significantly across jurisdictions. Certain activities – including but not limited to voucher trading, pre-market derivatives, token mapping and yield-splitting – may be regarded as securities issuance or derivatives trading and may therefore be subject to local regulatory requirements. Readers should familiarize themselves with, and comply with, all applicable laws and regulations in their jurisdiction relating to digital asset trading, investment, foreign exchange and securities.
The market data, valuation models, price ranges and projections referenced in this report are derived from third-party data platforms or public sources and are provided for reference only. Given the high volatility of crypto asset markets, relevant information may change at any time, and the contents of this report do not guarantee completeness, accuracy or timeliness. Any investment or trading decisions made based on this report are undertaken at the reader’s own risk. Neither the institution nor the author shall be liable for any direct or indirect loss arising from the use of this report.
If any part of this report touches on future token issuance, points redemption, or mechanism descriptions relating to specific exchange products, such content is intended solely as research-based interpretation. It does not signify that any related platform has formally launched, approved or endorsed a specific product. All examples are for illustrative and educational purposes only.
The post first appeared on HTX Square.
