Private company shares still trade through bilateral, paper-heavy processes that keep most investors out of venture-backed growth. Citi is now applying the depositary receipt model, long used to give investors access to foreign public equities, to that opaque market with a new Digital Depositary Receipt (DDR) product, according to an Aug. 25 announcement from Caplight, the pricing platform the bank selected for the offering.
How the DDR works
Caplight said the DDR product tokenizes private company shares for eligible investors, with Citi’s first receipt representing shares in Kaleido, Inc. The bank described itself as the first major institution to extend the depositary receipt model, which has facilitated cross-border access to public equities for decades, to private company shares, bringing institutional-grade custody and settlement to an asset class that has historically relied on manual, paper-based processes rather than a shared digital record.
The structure targets two long-running frictions in private markets: access and transparency in high-growth, venture-backed companies. Where depositary receipts let investors hold a claim on foreign public stock through a regulated intermediary, the DDR applies the same idea to shares that rarely change hands, combining Citi’s institutional reach with Caplight’s data infrastructure to give tokenized private securities a pricing and reporting mechanism that did not exist under the old bilateral model.
The pricing backbone
Caplight’s MarketPrice data feed will supply ongoing, independent pricing of the private securities underlying each DDR issuance, and will support transparent fee assessment and periodic custodial reporting of the program. The feed runs on the firm’s proprietary AI-driven pricing models, which synthesize real-time transaction data, market signals and fundamental data across more than 100,000 venture-backed companies.
“We’re proud to provide the independent pricing backbone for one of the most innovative products in private markets,” said Javier Avalos, Caplight’s chief executive and co-founder. He added that tokenized private securities let companies retain control over voting and a simplified cap table while broadening investor outreach.
What it signals
For Citi, the product is a step into tokenization of a traditionally opaque asset class rather than a public-market token, and Caplight’s pricing feed gives the receipts a valuation mechanism the old process lacked. The launch adds to the push to tokenize real-world assets that has gathered momentum among banks and asset managers this year.
