For decades, the most attractive investments in finance have lived behind closed doors: in private equity, structured credit, venture capital, and hedge funds. These asset classes generated distinct, uncorrelated sources of return that powered endowments and family offices, but were inaccessible to most investors. Entry required multi-million-dollar commitments, fund lockups, and connections to the right gatekeepers. Ordinary investors were left with a narrow menu: stocks, bonds, or index funds. Today, DeFi is changing that.
At Freeport, we believe the next era of investing is about access; hence we’re building a unified interface that makes these institutional-grade strategies accessible to everyone, not just crypto-native users. Instead of living across fragmented DeFi protocols, these investments should live in one seamless, intuitive platform, at freeportmarkets.com
Private Equity & Pre-IPO Companies
In private equity and venture capital, investors back growth-stage companies before they go public. But in today’s cash-rich environment, firms like OpenAI or Stripe can delay IPOs indefinitely, concentrating that upside among insiders. On-chain, tokenized markets are emerging that give retail investors synthetic access to this pre-IPO growth. Platforms like PreStocks list pre-IPO perpetuals for major private names, using SPV structures to achieve 1:1 backing, and offer fractional exposure to companies previously out of reach. It’s a decentralized mirror of venture investing, high risk, high upside, but fully transparent and liquid 24/7.
Structured Credit & Insurance
In structured credit and insurance, DeFi now fills a “missing middle” on the risk-return spectrum. In traditional markets, investors can choose between equities — risky but high-return (around 7-10% excess returns) — or investment-grade / high-yield bonds — safer but low-yield (around 1-3% excess returns).
The mid-single-digit, 3–7% excess-return space, once the domain of structured credit and reinsurance funds, was off-limits to most individuals. That gap is now closing. Products like Syrup USDC pool over-collateralized loans across diversified borrowers, earning a transparent correlation premium akin to high-grade structured credit. Resolv’s USR and RLP tranches recreate insurance and reinsurance structures on-chain, where senior investors earn steady yield and junior investors absorb tail risk for higher returns. Meanwhile, staked USDe from Ethena tokenizes the ETH basis trade — a hedge-fund staple — turning it into a composable yield instrument. Together, these products bring the same risk mechanics that made CDOs, catastrophe bonds, and basis trades lucrative for institutions into a form that retail investors can now hold directly.
Venture & Growth Investing
DeFi’s version of venture capital is also thriving. Many of the leading on-chain enterprises — Aave, Uniswap, Chainlink, Hyperliquid — are essentially growth-stage digital companies with real revenue, network effects, and rapidly growing user bases. Yet because capital is scarce and regulation uncertain, their cost of capital is extremely high, resulting in surprisingly low multiples. For example, Aave has more than 35 Billion on its balance sheet, generates more than a billion in fees annualized, and yet only typically trades between 4-5 Billion valuation. In effect, investors today can gain exposure to what are essentially high-growth, early-stage companies trading at compressed valuations — a risk-reward dynamic comparable to venture investing, but with full transparency onchain.
Hedge Funds
Even hedge-fund-like strategies, once executed only by dealer desks and quantitative firms, are now packaged into user-friendly vaults. Market-making, basis trading, and funding-rate arbitrage — all sources of low-volatility income in traditional markets — are available through DeFi vaults such as Hyperliquid’s HLP (market making), Morpho’s Vaults (active credit), and Stream Finance (basis trading). These are the same trades that prop desks and multi-strategy funds use to generate steady returns — now accessible to anyone with stablecoins and a wallet.
Why This Moment Matters
Each of the aforementioned institutional asset classes — Private Equity, Structured Credit, Venture Capital, and Hedge Funds — is being rebuilt on-chain, powered by new technology and shifting macro forces.
In Private Equity, companies are staying private longer, locking most investors out of early-stage growth. Tokenization is reversing that, fractionalizing pre-IPO exposure so everyday investors can access the same upside insiders enjoy. Structured Credit is being reborn through transparent, automated lending and insurance vaults that deliver mid-single-digit yields — the “missing middle” between bonds and equities. Venture Capital is migrating to open-source protocols like Aave, Chainlink, and Uniswap — high-growth, revenue-generating networks trading at compressed valuations because of crypto’s high cost of capital. And Hedge Fund strategies like basis trades and market-making are now embedded in smart-contract vaults, turning sophisticated arbitrage into one-click investments.
We’re building Freeport now because the timing has never been better — and may never be this good again. The infrastructure for tokenized assets has matured; regulatory frameworks have legitimized on-chain finance; and capital is flowing back into crypto after years of consolidation. Meanwhile, traditional markets are saturated, yields are compressed, and most investors remain locked out of the private-market returns that drive institutional performance.
This shift calls for an investing interface built on DeFi, but designed for everyone — not just crypto natives. The next generation of financial products shouldn’t require managing wallets, gas fees, or bridging assets between protocols. Instead, they should feel as seamless as a brokerage app, while still delivering the transparency, composability, and yield opportunities unique to on-chain finance.
The combination of tokenization and transparent risk structuring means the entire institutional return stack can now exist on-chain — and yet the user experience is still fragmented, technical, and intimidating for non-crypto investors. Freeport exists to unify that landscape. We’re building the seamless interface where anyone — not just traders or developers — can access the same diversified, risk-adjusted opportunities that once lived behind fund walls. This convergence of maturity, regulation, and accessibility makes today the generational moment to build.
Disclaimer
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