AI’s Hottest Private Firms Have Booming Crypto Shadow Market

The race to sell retail investors a piece of the AI boom has gone mainstream — closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles. Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth — ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access.

The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX — in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage.