Price spreads exceeding 50% indicate that pre-market arbitrage in crypto stocks is poised to become a new business opportunity in the crypto bear market.

Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

Edited by: Hao Fangzhou

Recently, Mysten Labs CEO evan.sui shared his views on the "bear market." He mentioned that he does not agree with the so-called "bear market is good, keep building" argument. In fact, the bear market is not "great," and packaging it as good for everyone ignores the real costs (such as discouraging builders and users). Many retail investors and excellent teams will face cash flow problems and have to exit, ultimately harming the long-term development of the crypto industry.

However, data supports this view. A report released by Lattice VC in October 2024 showed that over 80% of crypto startups that announced seed funding during the 2022 bear market were still in development. In other words, if projects can maintain relatively stable personnel and funding, a bear market can indeed be more conducive to project development and growth. The reasons might be that during a bear market, projects can focus more on product development and user experience optimization; or perhaps a bear market can hone a project's survival skills. In short, during a crypto bear market, aspiring entrepreneurs might actually find a way to survive and forge their own path to success.

In light of this, we will explore potential job opportunities and project directions during this period through a series of articles, "A Guide to Starting a Crypto Business in the Bear Market." If any crypto projects emerge or even grow rapidly during this period, Odaily welcomes them to discuss collaborations.

Today, let's talk about the hottest potential startup direction besides the prediction market right now – the pre-market price difference market between crypto and stocks.

The Real Demand in the Pre-Market Cryptocurrency Market: Platform Differentiation and Liquidity Bridge

As a bridge connecting the crypto market and the traditional financial market, cryptocurrency trading platforms have not only attracted high attention and active participation from crypto projects, but also from leading global securities platforms, including Nasdaq and the NYSE, which are all getting involved in order to capture incremental market share and further activate liquidity in the traditional financial market.

In addition, not only listed cryptocurrency concept stocks have ushered in the transformation of stock tokenization and on-chain contracts, but many popular concept stocks that have not yet gone public have also been highly sought after by the crypto market and traditional financial market, thus giving rise to a number of pre-market stock tokenization trading platforms.

Given that the capital market is about to see a wave of US IPOs, including companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX (xAI), Kalshi, Polymarket, OKX, and Kraken, 2026 is undoubtedly destined to be a "big year for IPOs".

Against the backdrop of a persistently declining crypto market with occasional rebounds, and a stock market booming across the board, the activity in the pre-market stock trading market further corroborates the above view—that both the crypto market and traditional financial markets have a strong demand for pre-market trading of popular concept stocks.

This is the primary reason why pre-market stock trading platforms such as PreStocks, Jarsy, and Tessera have emerged. Furthermore, compared to traditional financial markets like Hiive and Nasdaq Private Market, cryptocurrency pre-market trading offers more flexible trading methods, purchase limits, and entry barriers, along with relatively higher premiums, attracting a large number of users.

However, just as the same token may have different price differences on different exchanges, before a mechanism similar to oracles is introduced into the pre-market stock market, we can clearly see that, for whatever reason, there are price differences for the same underlying stock on different platforms, as mentioned above.

Based on the above information, we can make a somewhat bold judgment: the crypto market still lacks one or more "bridge platforms between stock pre-market trading markets".

This may be a necessary step forward in advancing the tokenization of stocks and pre-market stock trading—a unified and comprehensive platform encompassing pre-market trading in both traditional financial markets and crypto markets.

Below, we will take Kalshi and Polymarket, two leading prediction market platforms that recently sought $20 billion in funding, and SpaceX (xAI), valued at $1.25 trillion, as examples to explore the feasibility and real demand of this "startup direction".

Comparing pre-market price spreads across three major platforms—PreStocks, Jarsy, and Tessera—the largest spread exceeded 50%, with the largest price difference approaching $150.

Kalshi pre-market spread: as high as $148, with a spread rate of approximately 37%.

Taking Kalshi's pre-market trading market as an example, its prices on different platforms are as follows—

On the PreStocks platform, the pre-market price of the stock token is around $397; (compared to $369 mentioned in our article a month ago, "Kalshi Trading Volume Continues to Break New Records, What is a Reasonable Pre-Market Price?" (https://www.odaily.news/zh-CN/post/5209330), this represents an increase of nearly $30, or 7.6%).

On the Jarsy platform, the pre-market price of the stock is around $545. (This is an increase of over $40, or 8.1%, compared to $504 mentioned in our article a month ago, "Kalshi's Trading Volume Continues to Hit New Highs, What is a Reasonable Pre-Market Price?" (https://www.odaily.news/zh-CN/post/5209330).

In other words, the pre-market price difference for Kalshi stock on the two major trading platforms reached as high as $148 (Odaily Planet Daily note: Considering that the two platforms respectively adopt order book trading mechanism and on-chain liquidity token trading mechanism, we are only making an abstract comparison here and do not involve specific asset transfer methods, the same below). If calculated based on the pre-market price of $360 on the traditional financial market pre-market trading platform Hiive, the pre-market price difference is even as high as $185.

Polymarket pre-market spread: as high as $94, a spread exceeding 50%.

Taking Polymarket's pre-market trading market as an example, its prices on different platforms are as follows—

On the PreStocks platform, the pre-market price of the stock token is around $186 (Odaily Planet Daily note: the price has increased by 23% in the past 30 days).

Jarsy stock is priced at around $280 in pre-market trading.

In other words, the price difference between Polymarket's pre-market stock price on the two platforms is about $94, which is about 50.5%.

SpaceX (xAI) pre-market spread: approximately $75, spread rate 12.7%.

Taking SpaceX (xAI) as an example, its prices on different platforms are as follows—

On the PreStocks platform, the pre-market price of the stock token is around $666 (Odaily Planet Daily note: the increase over the past 30 days is 4.1%).

On the Tessera platform, the pre-market price of the stock token is currently around $591 (Odaily Planet Daily note: the increase over the past 30 days is approximately 14.5%).

In other words, the price difference between SpaceX stock and the two major platforms in pre-market trading was about $75, with a price difference rate of about 12.7%.

In summary, based on existing pre-market trading platforms, it may be possible to build a pre-market price spread market for cryptocurrencies and stocks, which, once sufficient pre-market tokens or equity capital are available, can meet the market's trading and speculative demands.

Of course, given that the current market liquidity is still within the millions of dollars, the platform's main business model may remain focused on transaction fees or LP fees, as well as the realization of price differences on the platform's own investment quota.