Chan Ahn is Founder and CEO of Tessera, a Solana-based platform that points tokens monitoring the financial efficiency of late-stage personal corporations similar to SpaceX, OpenAI, xAI and Kalshi, tradable permissionlessly on decentralized exchanges. Earlier than crypto, Chan spent greater than 15 years in conventional finance at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Credit score Suisse, specializing in derivatives, structured merchandise and personal markets, and he holds a PhD in computational finance from Imperial School.
Why you must hear
Chan’s start line is a structural shift most retail traders haven’t observed. Corporations are staying personal far longer, and by the point they record, the valuation has grown so giant that the IPO works extra as a payday for insiders than a possibility for everybody else. Pension funds and different establishments routinely maintain 20 to 30 p.c of their portfolios in personal property, whereas most particular person traders maintain none. Chan explains why: shopping for a secondary stake in an organization like Kalshi usually means discovering a specialist dealer, clearing KYC, paying attorneys to draft bespoke paperwork, negotiating for weeks with no seen value, then spending one other month verifying the place the shares got here from. From first name to closing can take three to 4 months, and accreditation guidelines maintain most individuals from trying it in any respect.
Tessera’s reply is a deliberate selection of construction, and Chan is unusually candid about it. Moderately than tokenizing shares instantly, Tessera holds the underlying inventory in bankruptcy-remote entities within the Cayman Islands and points tokens representing mortgage participation rights. Holders get the financial publicity however no possession, voting or dividend rights. Chan argues that is nearer to how most retail traders already maintain fractional shares by a dealer than they understand, and says it has allowed Tessera to acquire a authorized opinion that the tokens aren’t securities beneath Singapore regulation. The sensible result’s that anybody with a Solana pockets and as little as a greenback can commerce on Meteora or Jupiter with out KYC, with the US, China and sanctioned jurisdictions excluded. The mannequin has already been examined in manufacturing: SpaceX’s June IPO triggered a redemption cycle, and Chan describes how the holding entity is promoting down the inventory, with roughly a fifth bought up to now, and returning USDC to token holders professional rata.
The dialog then turns to the AI itemizing wave, the place Chan has been a notably disciplined voice. Disclosing that Tessera affords OpenAI publicity however nothing linked to Anthropic, he explains the straightforward discounted money move mannequin he constructed to check Anthropic’s IPO valuation. By his estimate, it requires income and margins to maintain increasing at about 20 p.c a yr for a decade. He’s firmly bullish on AI as a transformative know-how however cautions that being proper a few know-how isn’t the identical as being proper about every safety or the timing. Within the scorching take spherical, Chan describes himself as a Bitcoin maximalist of a specific variety: after constructing on Bitcoin himself, he misplaced religion in a Bitcoin utility economic system however got here to see these limits as strengthening its case as a retailer of worth in a multipolar world. He names blockchain turning into a part of on a regular basis life as his firmest conviction, with tokenization as one step towards it, and picks The Three-Physique Downside as his favourite science fiction.
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