Hecto, a private-markets infrastructure company, has introduced the first private market exposure token on the Canton Network. The instrument, called $NEOPRIME, is issued by Neoprime and is designed to give onchain investors contractual exposure to a curated basket of late-stage private companies, a segment of the market that has largely been reserved for venture funds, institutions, and wealthy individuals. The first trading pool opened alongside the announcement.
The token is structured as a tokenized debenture under British Virgin Islands law. Holders receive creditor rights against Neoprime's special purpose vehicle rather than shares in the underlying companies. Exposure is held through first- and second-layer SPVs against verified shares, meaning each position is backed by an actual holding instead of a synthetic price reference. Hecto presents this structure as a distinction from unauthorized wrapper tokens that have attracted regulatory scrutiny elsewhere.
The basket and its first position
$NEOPRIME is built around a basket of private companies at the frontier of American industry and hard technology. The names include Anduril, Project Prometheus, Figure AI, Crusoe, The Boring Company, Shield AI, Castelion, Hadrian, Saronic, Stoke Space, and Erebor. Erebor, a specialist bank for hard technology, is the first completed investment and is now available onchain for the first time. Positions in Shield AI and Anduril are in process, with the rest of the basket to follow as each is secured.
Eligibility for the index is deliberately narrow. A company qualifies only if it is pre-IPO, valued at a minimum of $1 billion, and has adequate pricing data available from independent third-party providers. The result is a book of names that are large, late stage, and genuinely marked, rather than speculative early bets.
A pricing mechanism aimed at reducing premiums
$NEOPRIME is designed to track the value of the assets behind it rather than drift to a large premium when demand is high. When the token trades above its net asset value, eligible parties can mint new tokens. That new capital buys more underlying shares, increasing supply and pulling the price back toward fair value.
Most tokenized pre-IPO products are static wrappers around a fixed pool of scarce shares. When demand is strong, the price can run to a steep premium, and buyers effectively pay a scarcity tax on top of the actual company exposure. Hecto says $NEOPRIME is designed to remove that tax. When a company in the basket announces an IPO process, its position is sold in the secondary market and the proceeds support a buyback of $NEOPRIME, returning realized value to remaining holders.
Private markets on Canton
The launch marks the arrival of private market exposure products on the Canton Network, an institutional blockchain built for privacy, compliance, and programmable settlement. $NEOPRIME is Hecto's first PMX token and the foundation of a product category the company intends to expand across the most in-demand private companies in the world.
"After a year of careful planning, research and development, it feels incredible to witness the launch of the first pre-IPO tokens built on Hecto infrastructure and trading on Canton," said Ultan Miller, co-founder and CEO of Hecto. "This is not just a milestone for Hecto, or for Canton, but for the pre-IPO market as a whole. $NEOPRIME sets a new bar in pre-IPO access onchain, giving token holders better disclosures, better data and fairer pricing than ever before."
"The old primes won the last century. They will not build this one," said Ross Belhomme, Trustee at Neoprime. "$NEOPRIME is how that rebuild is owned while it is still private: a named book, a published NAV, and a ticker that is the thesis."
Hecto was founded by a team that includes former Goldman Sachs and Barclays executives. The company develops tokenized private market products on the Canton Network with the goal of making exposure to high-growth private companies as accessible as investing in public markets. Neoprime is the investment vehicle focused on America's next industrial giants, and $NEOPRIME is its single token.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
