Venture Knew How to Buy $7.7 Trillion. Can It Sell?

The Asset Class That Won

Venture always had two ways out: get bought, or go public. For twenty years that was enough — M&A and IPOs did the selling, and capital found its way back.

Then private markets outgrew the arrangement. Around 69% of US capital is now raised privately. The median US tech company takes ~14 years to IPO, up from about five in 1999 — not because companies are stuck, but because private capital lets them stay. The result is an asset class of roughly $7.7 trillion across 1,300+ private unicorns.

That's a success story. It just comes with a new job: an asset class this large needs its own way to trade. Waiting for the IPO isn't a liquidity strategy anymore.

Returns Need a Way Home

A markup becomes a return only when someone realizes it — the difference between TVPI and DPI. And the facts say that difference is large, because multiples move independently of the businesses underneath them.

Public SaaS is the cleanest dataset: median multiples went from roughly 18x revenue in 2021 to 6–7x today, while most of those companies kept growing 25–35% a year. Wix, one name among many, peaked at ~$14.5B (~11x sales) in 2021 and trades around $2.6B (~1.3x) now — with revenue up from ~$1.2B to nearly $2B in between. The business nearly doubled; the multiple did the rest. Token markets showed the same mechanics on a faster clock: 2024 launches came with a median float of ~12%, and ~$97B of supply unlocked across 2025 into prices that had been set by that thin float.

None of this is a crash story — it's how cycles work. Multiples breathe, floats expand, funds have ten-year lives. The fund benchmarks simply make it measurable (Carta, Q1 2026): the median 2021-vintage fund marks 1.04x TVPI against 0.00x DPI — the marks exist, the cash doesn't. And it isn't just young funds: the median 2018 fund has returned 0.15x after eight years, and even in the 2017 vintage only the top decile has given LPs their capital back (1.18x DPI; the median sits at 0.31x). Good companies, good entries — just no path from paper to money.

What We Learned in Crypto

Crypto runs a full market cycle in the time equity takes to mark a quarter — which made it the perfect training ground for exactly this discipline.

Over the last cycles, OFFX facilitated $500M+ in notional volume across locked and early-stage token positions — turning marks into realized liquidity for holders. And we saw the same pattern over and over: holders who treated liquidity as a decision — trimming into strength, realizing part of a gain, keeping the rest — compounded. Selling wasn't the opposite of conviction. It was how conviction paid out.

That's the playbook we're bringing over: the counterparty network, price discovery, structuring, and settlement discipline built for hard-to-trade assets.

Equity's Liquidity Moment

The timing isn't ours alone — the whole market is moving. Secondaries hit a record ~$160B in 2024 (~$89B LP-led, ~$71B GP-led), continuation vehicles went mainstream, and the IPO window is reopening at the very top of the stack. Liquidity is no longer a distress signal in private markets; it's becoming standard portfolio management. This is what an asset class maturing looks like.

What's still scarce is access below the mega-fund ticket: a credible venue where a fund, a founder, an employee, or a GP can actually transact.

Launching: OFFX Equity Secondaries

That's what we're launching. OFFX's equity vertical facilitates direct secondaries, LP-led, and GP-led transactions — bringing the infrastructure we built for token markets to pre-IPO equity. And through SPVs, primary and secondary, it opens access to positions in the world's best technology companies — names that were previously reachable only through a fund allocation or a seat on the cap table.

For sellers, the exit becomes a choice: sell some, hold some, pick your moment. For buyers, access to an asset class that was largely locked. For the market, the missing half of the machine.

The Way Out

Venture spent twenty years mastering the way in. The next decade belongs to the investors who also master the way out — not because they have to, but because now they can.