How does pre-market trading become the "invisible infrastructure" of the crypto market? A comprehensive overview of the billion-dollar market

As financing channels tighten and token issuance cycles continue to extend, a brand-new market structure is quietly taking shape within the crypto ecosystem—pre-market trading. This “Level 1.5 market,” which connects primary market investments with secondary market trading, has evolved from scattered private transactions into an independent pricing layer, surpassing a hundred billion dollars in scale, and continues to attract deep participation from institutions, retail investors, and project teams.

The Logic Behind the Billion-Dollar Pre-Market

The emergence of the pre-market is not a coincidence but the result of multiple factors working together.

Changes in the financing environment are the core driving force. After traditional primary financing contracts, projects are forced to extend the cycle from fundraising to the official token trading (TGE). During this “gap period,” user funds and attention need to be effectively retained. Project teams have begun to maintain community enthusiasm through innovative means such as point incentives, airdrop expectations, and test qualifications, while users continue to invest time and funds. In this process, the originally non-tradable “early contributions” gradually acquire asset-like conditions.

Changes on the token supply side also promote market formation. As the number of projects surges, the barriers to token issuance have significantly lowered, and attention and expectations have become truly scarce resources. Pre-market trading mechanisms around these factors naturally grow, gradually forming an intermediate market that was previously only within top-tier VCs and leading exchanges.

The role of exchanges is expanding. From being merely “listing nodes,” exchanges are beginning to shift toward “pre-issuance participation,” with pre-market trading product lines becoming a core competitive advantage.

The Three-Layer Asset Structure of Pre-Market Ecosystem

Pre-market is not a single form but a multi-dimensional trading system composed of three types of assets:

First Layer: Future Token Value Assets

These assets are directly anchored to future spot prices, including pre-market OTC, pre-market spot, and pre-market perpetual contracts. Among these, pre-market perpetual contracts have become the largest category due to their leverage features and flexible risk management functions. Users can engage in long and short positions based on future prices even before tokens are officially launched, further advancing the price discovery mechanism.

Second Layer: Points and Yield Rights Assets

Points accumulated by users during project participation are evolving into tradable financial assets. These points represent users’ actual contributions and engagement, with liquidity provided through standardized OTC markets. Several leading projects have established relatively mature points trading systems, with monthly trading volumes reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.

Third Layer: Equity Credential Assets

Non-standard rights such as NFTs, BuildKeys, whitelist qualifications, and Early Access quotas are tokenized into tradable financial assets. These assets connect the full chain from “user behavior—market expectation—rights confirmation—final delivery.”

The coexistence of these three layers makes pre-market no longer a single tool but a multi-dimensional, multi-stage pre-trading system.

Market Scale and Pricing Power

Pre-market trading already has a clear scale foundation and market influence.

Data shows that leading projects often generate hundreds of millions of dollars in pre-market trading demand. For example, star projects like Monad and WLFI have accumulated pre-market trading volumes exceeding $1 billion each, pushing the entire pre-market scale into the hundreds of billions.

More importantly, the price discovery function of pre-market is increasingly evident. The deviation between the TGE spot prices of many projects and their last pre-market trading prices has become an important indicator of project enthusiasm and market expectations. This demonstrates that pre-market is gaining pricing power comparable to the secondary market.

Structural Risks Behind the Apparent Prosperity

The rapid development of pre-market also exposes obvious risks:

Liquidity fragility. Pre-market trading depth is far below that of mature markets. Large capital inflows and outflows can cause sharp price fluctuations, posing high slippage and risk for retail investors.

Information asymmetry. Settlement execution heavily depends on project teams’ willingness and ability to fulfill commitments, while project teams possess information far beyond ordinary participants. Risks such as delays, amendments, and changing terms persist over the long term.

Rule discrepancies. Different asset forms lack unified standards in trading rules, performance standards, and risk-sharing methods, which can easily lead to disputes.

Unclear risk allocation. When project teams default or extreme market conditions occur, the mechanisms to protect participants’ rights are still underdeveloped.

These issues mean that whether pre-market can further expand depends critically on its ability to upgrade from an “opportunity market” to a regulated, transparent market structure.

Future Evolution Directions of Pre-Market Trading

Industry trends suggest that pre-market trading is developing along three main directions:

Standardization and regulation. Leading exchanges are establishing unified pre-market contract standards, clearing mechanisms, and risk management standards, attempting to move this market from the “gray area” into a “regulatory framework.”

Derivatives deepening. Extending from spot to perpetual contracts, options, and other structured products provides professional traders with more complex hedging and speculative tools.

Ecological collaboration. Cross-exchange flow of pre-market assets, integration with wallets and rating agencies, is forming a more complete pre-trading ecosystem.

Strategic Significance of Pre-Market Trading

For project teams, pre-market trading has become an unavoidable market reality. Properly leveraging this channel can achieve early user feedback, optimize tokenomics, and reduce TGE risks.

For exchanges, pre-market trading product lines not only enhance competitive differentiation but also allow earlier involvement in project lifecycles, building stronger user stickiness and market influence.

For users, pre-market trading offers an opportunity window to participate in emerging assets but also brings significant risks—requiring careful participation based on a thorough understanding of market mechanisms and risk characteristics.

Conclusion

Pre-market trading is not a short-term trend but a long-term development driven by changes in the financing landscape, upgrades in user participation methods, and platform product innovation. It is evolving from a “gray area before issuance” into a key infrastructure connecting primary and secondary markets.

In the future, the ultimate form of this market is likely to be a mature market layer characterized by increasing standardization, more diverse participants, more transparent pricing mechanisms, and improved risk management. This will not only reshape project issuance pathways but also redefine the competitive landscape of exchanges and offer new opportunities and challenges for global digital asset market participants.