The rise of a hundred-billion-level pre-market trading arena: How to reshape the way crypto assets are launched

Pre-market trading is becoming an independent market layer in the crypto industry that cannot be ignored. When the financing environment tightens and project issuance cycles are forced to lengthen, early-stage trading that originally existed only within VC offices and exchanges has gradually evolved into a massive ecosystem covering hundreds of billions of dollars. This market not only changes the way projects are issued but also reshapes the starting line for user participation in the crypto market.

How the Passive Lengthening of Token Issuance Cycles Gives Rise to New Markets

In the past, projects typically completed financing and token listing quickly, but this has changed in recent years. With increased difficulty in fundraising and prolonged cycles, project teams face an awkward situation—user enthusiasm wanes, and community activity declines.

To fill the vacuum before TGE, project teams have begun experimenting with new methods such as points, airdrop expectations, and test qualifications to maintain popularity. Meanwhile, users continuously invest time and funds. During this process, “early contributions” and “future rights” that were previously untradeable gradually gained commodity attributes.

At the same time, the barriers to token issuance are lowering, the number of projects is surging, and pre-market trading mechanisms centered around attention, expectations, and future rights have begun to grow naturally. This is no longer just private agreements between a few VCs but an independent market layer—featuring clear pricing, liquidity, and game-theoretic mechanisms.

Three Asset Forms in Pre-market Trading

From the perspective of “how future value is anchored,” the pre-market trading ecosystem can be divided into three types of assets:

Direct trading around token value: This includes pre-market OTC, pre-market spot, and pre-market perpetual contracts. These assets are most closely linked to the final spot price and primarily serve price discovery. Leading projects can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in trading demand at this stage, with cumulative pre-market trading volumes for projects like WLFI and Monad even surpassing one billion dollars.

Quantified forms of user contributions: Points and airdrop rights. Points earned through participation in project testing, community building, and other activities have gradually formed standardized OTC markets. These points carry incentives for user contributions and are priced in advance through trading and profit-sharing.

Derivative tokens representing rights: NFT, qualification certificates, BuildKey, and other forms convert non-standard rights such as whitelist spots, early access, and token quotas into tradable assets.

These three asset forms connect the full chain of “user contribution → market expectation → rights confirmation → final settlement.” Pre-market trading is no longer a single tool but a comprehensive pre-trading system covering the entire cycle.

Perpetual Contracts Expand the Boundaries of Pre-market Trading

Originally, pre-market trading only involved OTC and spot trading, but the introduction of derivatives has opened new possibilities. Pre-market perpetual contracts allow users to leverage trade around future spot prices before tokens are even listed, pushing price discovery further forward. Today, pre-market perpetual contracts have become one of the most traded pre-market instruments.

Take WLFI as an example: HTX launched pre-market perpetual contracts before its official TGE, enabling users to participate in price speculation and risk management at the earliest stage. This reflects a broader trend: the role of exchanges is shifting from “gatekeeper at listing” to “participant before issuance.” Pre-market trading has become a core component of the exchange’s product matrix.

Risks and Systemic Flaws Behind the Hundred-Billion Market

The potential scale of pre-market trading is clear. However, rapid market expansion also exposes structural risks:

• Liquidity is inherently weak, and large funds can easily manipulate prices;
• Information asymmetry is deeply rooted, and settlement heavily depends on project team cooperation;
• Different asset forms lack unified standards in rules, performance mechanisms, and risk distribution.

These issues determine that further expansion of the pre-market trading market depends on a key question—whether it can evolve from an “opportunistic market” into a more institutionalized, collaboratively governed structure.

From the Gray Area to Market Infrastructure Evolution

Pre-market trading is not a fleeting trend. It results from changes in the financing environment, upgrades in user participation methods, and the evolution of trading platform products. In this process, pre-market trading is gradually evolving from a vague pre-issuance zone into a critical infrastructure layer connecting primary and secondary markets.

From the project side, this changes the pace of fundraising and project launch; from the user side, it breaks the previous scenario where participation was only possible at listing; from the exchange side, it extends the platform’s value chain. These changes are reshaping the entire issuance and circulation ecosystem of crypto assets.

In the future, pre-market trading is likely to no longer be a temporary phenomenon but a long-term, formalized core market structure in the crypto space. A hundred-billion-dollar pre-market trading market will become a new benchmark for Web3 asset launches.