Morgan Stanley is making a strategic move into the private-markets space with its agreement to acquire EquityZen, a leading platform for trading pre-IPO shares. The deal, announced on October 29, 2025, expands Morgan Stanley’s reach beyond public equities into a fast-growing market traditionally reserved for venture funds and ultra-high-net-worth investors.
EquityZen allows accredited investors to buy and sell shares of private companies such as SpaceX, Stripe, or Databricks before they go public. With over 800,000 users and hundreds of completed transactions, the platform is considered a pioneer in secondary private-equity trading.
For the crypto and Web3 audience, the acquisition highlights a growing trend — the tokenisation of private markets. As banks seek to digitize ownership records and democratize access, blockchain technology could become the natural backbone for such platforms. EquityZen’s structure resembles tokenised ecosystems where investors own fractional shares — a concept long familiar to crypto natives through NFTs and real-world asset (RWA) tokens.
If Morgan Stanley integrates blockchain-based settlement or tokenised representations of shares, this could mark one of the first major bridges between traditional private equity and digital asset infrastructure.
