Tessera – SpaceX Exposure From a One-Dollar Solana Wallet
Chan Ahn is Founder and CEO of Tessera, a Solana-based platform that issues tokens tracking the economic performance of late-stage private companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, xAI and Kalshi, tradable permissionlessly on decentralized exchanges. Before crypto, Chan spent more than 15 years in traditional finance at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, specializing in derivatives, structured products and private markets, and he holds a PhD in computational finance from Imperial College.
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Chan’s starting point is a structural shift most retail investors have not noticed. Companies are staying private far longer, and by the time they list, the valuation has grown so large that the IPO works more as a payday for insiders than an opportunity for everyone else. Pension funds and other institutions routinely hold 20 to 30 percent of their portfolios in private assets, while most individual investors hold none. Chan explains why: buying a secondary stake in a company like Kalshi typically means finding a specialist broker, clearing KYC, paying lawyers to draft bespoke documents, negotiating for weeks with no visible price, then spending another month verifying where the shares came from. From first call to closing can take three to four months, and accreditation rules keep most people from attempting it at all.
Tessera’s answer is a deliberate choice of structure, and Chan is unusually candid about it. Rather than tokenizing shares directly, Tessera holds the underlying stock in bankruptcy-remote entities in the Cayman Islands and issues tokens representing loan participation rights. Holders get the economic exposure but no ownership, voting or dividend rights. Chan argues this is closer to how most retail investors already hold fractional shares through a broker than they realize, and says it has allowed Tessera to obtain a legal opinion that the tokens are not securities under Singapore law. The practical result is that anyone with a Solana wallet and as little as a dollar can trade on Meteora or Jupiter without KYC, with the US, China and sanctioned jurisdictions excluded. The model has already been tested in production: SpaceX’s June IPO triggered a redemption cycle, and Chan describes how the holding entity is selling down the stock, with roughly a fifth sold so far, and returning USDC to token holders pro rata.
The conversation then turns to the AI listing wave, where Chan has been a notably disciplined voice. Disclosing that Tessera offers OpenAI exposure but nothing linked to Anthropic, he explains the simple discounted cash flow model he built to test Anthropic’s IPO valuation. By his estimate, it requires revenue and margins to keep expanding at about 20 percent a year for a decade. He is firmly bullish on AI as a transformative technology but cautions that being right about a technology is not the same as being right about each security or the timing. In the hot take round, Chan describes himself as a Bitcoin maximalist of a particular kind: after building on Bitcoin himself, he lost faith in a Bitcoin application economy but came to see those limits as strengthening its case as a store of value in a multipolar world. He names blockchain becoming part of everyday life as his firmest conviction, with tokenization as one step toward it, and picks The Three-Body Problem as his favorite science fiction.
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Fhenix – Privacy on a Need-to-Know Basis
