From Compound to Opening Bell: Leshner's $2M Pry On-Chain IPO Experiment @rleshner (Compound & Robot Ventures Founder) Recent Action Fryer: Invested $2.03M to acquire a 56.9% stake in LQR House ($LQR, community abbreviation$YHC), a NASDAQ shell company, and then put on-chain compliant securities on Solana through the Superstate he founded, and began to promote the "on-chain stock market". This is not a simple shell arbitrage, but a narrative docking experiment of DeFi × RWA × TradFi. Shell acquisition + on-chain infrastructure opening On July 14, Leshner filed Form 13D with the SEC, formally taking control of $LQR, a company that used to be an online liquor retailer and now has little actual business, with a negative net worth and a pure shell. He bought at an average price of ~$3.77, with a market cap of only $2.5M, and took a controlling stake outright, planning to purge the board of directors and redirect it (including BTC treasury, on-chain securities). This isn't the first time he's explored TradFi Superstate, the RWA asset manager he founded in 2023, raised $18.1M from investors including Distributed Global, CoinFund, Galaxy, Arrington and others. Its two main products: $USTB: On-chain T-bill fund, AUM > $700M, rapid growth, support ERC-20 liquid transfers $USCC: carry-based fund, the structure is USD cash + T-bill + crypto basis trade (BTC/ETH), which shares the clearing/auditing/on-chain base with $USTB The total AUM of the two is ~$856M, all of which are for qualified investors, and they take the route of "compliant on-chain asset management". Opening Bell: The Nasdaq of on-chain securities In May 2025, Superstate launched Opening Bell: a native on-chain issuance + trading platform (based on Solana) that supports the entire process of U.S. stock securities (no packaging, no synthesis). In the tank: Shareholder registration, auditing, and compliance tracking on the whole chain Direct issuance of on-chain original shares (SEC filing) to support secondary trading Building a composable financial layer (e.g. token dividends, stock collateral, etc.) $LQR may serve as Opening Bell's first "real-world" shell injection vehicle, becoming a pilot for on-chain IPO + M&A experiments. As @MapleLeafCap said: this is the proof-of-concept of the three-line fusion of "shell company + tokenization + SEC compliance". Patch in the last piece of the puzzle for RWA There has always been an on-chain bond (T-bill) RWA in the market, but the on-chain equity is a gap. Now, Superstate has completed the bootstrapping of "native on-chain securities" with TradFi tactics (13D control shell) + DeFi infra (Solana, token, on-chain clearing and settlement). This is different from traditional tokenization: instead of packaging traditional stocks into on-chain tokens, it allows the original equity to be directly issued on-chain, traded on-chain, and compliant on-chain The potential financial stack will become: Stock Registration → Stock Token → Account Opening + Compliance → Investment/Trading → Portfolio into DeFi System (Lending, LP, Options, Automatic Distribution of Dividends) If this stack runs through, it may bring a "new entrance to hundreds of billions of TVL". It's not a narrative, it's an offense From Compound to Superstate, Leshner has been building on-chain native versions of finance. This LQR acquisition is crypto native's direct move into financial infrastructure, taking into account compliance, market, technology, and asset structure. If that happens, Opening Bell could become an onchain alternative to Nasdaq. If successful, it will be one more key for many founders who want liquidity in U.S. stocks. Is there another way to play currency stock trading? — ArkStream Daily Alpha 7.17