IPOP
Initial Public Offering Proxy
Wall Street's best day, for everyone.
Synthetic exposure to the first trading day of U.S. IPOs, on Arbitrum.
Live prototype on Arbitrum testnetThe opportunity
A documented premium, reserved for the few
For more than four decades, U.S. IPOs have, on average, closed their first trading day above their offer price. This first-day pop, known as IPO underpricing, is one of the most thoroughly documented anomalies in financial economics. It has persisted across market cycles, regulatory regimes, and four and a half decades of data.
Reserved for institutions
Allocations at the offer price go to institutional clients and the largest accounts. Retail brokers grant a few hundred to a few thousand dollars at most, by lottery, and an informal rule discourages selling on day one. The most profitable day of an IPO is the one a retail investor is least able to act on.
The day retail products skip
The leading retail vehicle, the Renaissance IPO ETF, adds newly public companies on the fifth trading day, by fund rule. The most popular retail IPO product is structurally built to miss the day that carries the premium.
IPOP is built to make that premium directly and repeatedly accessible.
How it works
A percentage proxy, not a price replicator
IPOP does not try to make its token cost what an IPO share costs. It tracks how far an IPO moves, in percentage terms, from its offer price. The absolute prices of the token and the share are never aligned, and that is what lets a single token follow a different IPO, or basket of IPOs, every day.
Lock-in
Shortly before a tracked IPO opens, the protocol fixes two reference origins: the IPO's offer price and IPOP's own market price at that moment.
Track the day
A rule-based stabilization bot keeps the token aligned with the IPO's percentage move, within a declared capacity of +100% on the upside and -20% on the downside.
Close
At the U.S. market close the tracking relationship ends and the token returns to free trading until the next lock-in.
Tracking is best-effort within that declared capacity, and the floor is not a hard guarantee.
First-day return only
Exposure to the first-day percentage move of classical U.S. IPOs, not a long-term position.
Equal-weighted basket
On multi-IPO days it tracks the simple average: the synthetic equivalent of allocating the same cash to every U.S. IPO of the day.
A percentage proxy
It tracks how far an IPO moves from its offer price, not the absolute share price. Never a replica of any share.
No claim on equity
No SPV, no custodied shares, and no company names or tickers in the contracts. Exposure to underpricing as a class. IPOP makes no claim on any specific company's equity.
Why it's different
Four properties no live product combines
The market around IPOs and tokenized equity expanded sharply in 2025 and 2026, yet no live product brings together all four of the characteristics that define IPOP. Every adjacent product offers at most two of them, and each solves a real, complementary problem.
An implicit basket of all qualifying U.S. IPOs of the day, rather than a single company.
Exposure to the first-day percentage return only, not a long-term position.
A synthetic structure, with no underlying asset and no SPV.
Permissionless access via DEX, open to anyone with a wallet.
Where IPOP sits among its neighbors
Proof
Don't trust, verify
A working prototype runs on the Arbitrum Sepolia testnet, with on-chain transactions anyone can verify, alongside a recorded walkthrough. This section is explicit about what is real and what is simulated, because that distinction is the point.
End-to-end session on testnet, 3 min 45 sec. It captures the lock-in, the oracle report, the safety-rail clamp, and the bot's response.
0xe8ba6555b38823bbe0747b3e0cf35c51b7b83ecf19b42d7109ac26938625120c
Verify the pool: paste this poolId into the StateView read functions (getSlot0, getLiquidity). The pool lives in the Uniswap v4 PoolManager.
What the session shows
It combines a real Reddit first-day pop with a deliberately injected oracle anomaly, a synthetic spike to roughly +1000%, added specifically to trigger the safety rail. The rail clamped the target to +120%, and the clamp is a real on-chain event.
Scope
The demo runs on a vanilla Uniswap v4 pool without the custom hook, which is deferred to a later stage, and the pool is seeded at demonstration scale rather than production size. The off-chain stack, the keeper and the bot, runs end to end against these contracts.
The +83% peak, read honestly
After the clamp the pool peaked near +83%, not +120%. That is a per-step size cap used only in the demo, so the bot could never spend the seed wallet in a single move. It is not a firepower limit. Production places no volume cap on interventions during an IPO.
Status
What this is, and what it is not yet
IPOP is an early-stage protocol, and this page states its limits as plainly as the rest. The phenomenon it captures is documented across more than four decades. The product that captures it is new, and the work to make it production grade is still ahead.
Testnet, not mainnet
A working prototype runs on Arbitrum Sepolia. It is not yet deployed on mainnet with real capital.
Not yet audited
The smart contracts and the bot software have not been audited. Independent audits are a funded milestone and the gate to any mainnet launch.
Single chain by design
The MVP deploys on one chain. This keeps the system simple and removes the cross-venue arbitrage a multi-chain deployment would reintroduce.
One founder, for now
The project was designed, validated, and built by its founder. The team is built around that foundation as the project matures.
Demand is unmeasured
The underlying premium is proven across decades of data, but appetite for this specific product will only be shown after launch. This page does not present it as settled.
None of this is hidden. The economic validation was carried out specifically to find and quantify these limits, and the roadmap is, in part, a plan to retire them.
FAQ
Questions, answered plainly
What is IPOP?
IPOP is a synthetic token that tracks the first-day percentage return of classical U.S. IPOs, weighting each day's IPOs equally. It is a percentage proxy, not a price replicator: it tracks how far an IPO moves from its offer price, while holding no shares, claiming no interest in any underlying equity, and naming no issuer in its contracts.
How does the protocol make money, and who earns it?
Revenue comes from a 1% round-trip fee on trades, taken in ETH and driven by trading volume rather than by how the IPOs perform. That fee accrues to the issuing company as ordinary revenue. The IPOP token itself does not entitle holders to any share of protocol fees, and there is no buyback, fee redistribution, or staking reward attached to it.
Why does it weight every IPO equally?
Equal weighting is the synthetic translation of allocating the same cash amount to every U.S. IPO of the day, and it matches the equally weighted figure that headlines the academic dataset. A proceeds or market-cap weighting would expose holders to asset-class concentration, which is a different product. The honest trade-off: on days when several IPOs move in sharply divergent directions, the equal-weighted average can approach or exceed the bot's declared capacity.
Why is it built on Arbitrum?
Arbitrum offers the deepest DeFi liquidity among Ethereum Layer 2 networks, which matters for a product whose experience depends on a single deep pool. Its gas costs are low enough to sustain the protocol's ongoing operations, its tooling is mature for the protocol's security profile, and its private mempool structurally blocks the sandwich attacks and front-running that affect public-mempool chains. The MVP is single-chain by design.
Is the price data centralized?
For the MVP, a single keeper signs price reports drawn from institutional-grade U.S. equity market data, the same regulated market data layer that retail brokers rely on. A secondary layer cross-checks decentralized oracle networks, Pyth and Chainlink, where coverage is available, and pauses the bot when sources diverge. The oracle is a replaceable module, governed by a public multisig with a timelock, and the roadmap moves it toward a decentralized publisher network. The protocol is candid that the MVP keeper is a single layer today.
How does IPOP think about regulation?
Synthetic on-chain equity has a difficult history, and IPOP enters the space with explicit awareness of it. The protocol's structure reflects deliberate choices: no governance token, protocol fees that accrue to the company rather than to token holders, no special purpose vehicle or custodied shares, and no claim on any specific company's equity. The regulatory treatment of synthetic on-chain instruments is unsettled and varies materially across jurisdictions. IPOP does not assert a legal classification of its token. Obtaining jurisdiction-specific legal opinions before any mainnet launch is a funded milestone, and in the meantime the protocol operates in the open, with a public multisig, hardcoded parameters, and operations anyone can verify on-chain.
Can I buy IPOP today?
Not yet. IPOP is a working prototype on the Arbitrum Sepolia testnet, not a mainnet deployment with real capital. A mainnet launch follows independent audits of the contracts and the bot software. There is no token sale, airdrop, or token giveaway.
Team
Built by its founder, designed for a team
IPOP is currently led by its founder, Alessandro Fenili. The project is at an early stage: there is no incorporated company yet, and the founder is its only full-time member. This is an honest account of who is behind the project today, and what the raise is built to add.
Finance and capital markets, with published research on IPO pricing.
LinkedInHis background is in finance and capital markets, and it maps directly onto the product. He published academic research on IPO pricing (ESG and the Pricing of IPOs: Does Sustainability Matter, SSRN, 2021), holds an MSc in Communication and Economics from USI Lugano (Magna Cum Laude), and works with the quantitative and market-data tools that underpin this project's validation, including Bloomberg, Refinitiv Eikon, Datastream, WRDS, and R.
His track record is in building a credible analytical product inside a conservative financial industry and earning institutional adoption for it. As coordinator of ESG.IAMA at ET.Group in Milan, he grew a sustainability assessment from 23 participating asset managers in 2022 to 119 in 2025, representing roughly EUR 49.9 trillion in combined assets under management, established a scientific committee drawn from major financial institutions, advised 11 asset managers directly, and launched a private-markets spin-off. That is the same kind of work IPOP requires: a rigorous methodology, and the trust of a skeptical market.
The prototype was conceived, validated, and built by the founder himself, including the smart contracts, the stabilization bot, and the dashboard, deployed and verifiable on Arbitrum Sepolia. That a single person has taken IPOP from concept to a working on-chain system is the project's strongest evidence of execution.
What the raise builds
The raise is sized to build a team around that foundation:
- A senior smart-contract engineer for the Uniswap v4 hook, the highest-risk component.
- A backend engineer for the keeper and the stabilization bot.
- A frontend engineer for the dashboard.
- A part-time growth lead.
- A public 3-of-5 governance multisig, with independent legal and technical signers.
Those roles are not yet filled. They are among the first appointments the funding enables.
Contact
Get in touch
For investors, partners, press, or anyone curious about the project, email is the fastest way to reach the founder directly. The white paper, one-pager, and pitch deck are available on request.
Request the materials
- White paper
- One-pager
- Pitch deck
Available on request. Email and mention what you would like to see.