The Green Light
The SEC approved the Long‑Term Stock Exchange in May 2019. In August 2019, LTSE closed a $50 million Series B led by Founders Fund, with Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, and Initialized Capital participating. Trading launched in September 2020. Volume remained light. Asana's 2021 direct listing delivered the first real pulse. Twilio followed, then left in 2022, citing costs. By early 2023, LTSE had one active listing.
The exchange's product is its listing standards. Companies must publish and maintain long‑term strategy policies — environmental targets, governance standards, board commitments to multi‑decade horizons. "It is not enough to make pledges to your stakeholders; it is time for binding commitments the public can believe," Eric Ries said when thredUP dual‑listed in May 2023. The resale platform became the first consumer brand on LTSE, joining Asana as the second active listing. CEO James Reinhart had opened talks two years earlier. "We're here to make a difference. Not for two or three years, but for 20, 40, 50 years," he told CNBC.
Exchange economics are brutal. More than a dozen U.S. venues exist, but NYSE and Nasdaq swallow the vast majority of volume. Alternatives fight for oxygen. LTSE's model doesn't chase volume — Ries has said he isn't concerned with market share the way rivals are. The capital lets the exchange operate without maximizing trading revenue, which in turn lets it hold companies to standards that would be commercially suicidal on a volume‑driven platform.
Zoran Perkov, LTSE's top operations executive, framed the approval as advancing "a new way of being public for a generation of companies that aspire to build their businesses and generate value for decades to come." The exchange anticipates completing administrative and technical steps to accept more listings. The question now: can the patient‑capital pipeline attract frontier‑tech ventures whose R&D horizons exceed the quarterly cycle?
Why Frontier Tech Cares
LTSE pitches itself as the only U.S. national securities exchange built to match patient capital with companies that measure progress in years, not quarters. Its standards require each company to publish long‑term strategy policies, adopt a board‑level mission pledge, and maintain a dedicated long‑term committee. Ries has argued that the current public‑market incentive system "makes it difficult for companies to do the right thing" when the right thing requires capital patience.
The exchange also does not optimize for trading revenue, which reduces pressure to chase high‑frequency volume at the expense of stable, long‑horizon shareholders. The friction is practical. Liquidity on LTSE remains a fraction of Nasdaq's or NYSE's. The dual‑listing route thredUP took (maintaining a primary listing elsewhere) adds compliance overhead. Twilio's exit suggests the cost‑benefit calculus can flip quickly for a company that needs deep, continuous order flow. Ries acknowledges the slow build: "We only want the very best companies." For founders weighing an IPO in the next two years, the exchange exists as a live option — but one whose value proposition will be proven by the next handful of listings, not by its mission statement.
The Incumbent Counterplay
Nasdaq lists roughly 4,100 companies and clears 1.8 billion trades a day. It doesn't need to chase LTSE's model to stay relevant. But its product sprint since LTSE's approval reads like a defensive playbook written with the patient‑capital pitch in mind. Since 2019, Nasdaq has layered long‑horizon and ESG infrastructure onto its core business: a Sustainable Bond Network (December 2019), a majority stake in carbon‑removal marketplace Puro.earth (June 2021), and the acquisition of ESG reporting platform Metrio (2022), whose greenhouse‑gas targets were later validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. Together they give any listed company a data‑and‑disclosure stack to signal long‑term intent without leaving the exchange — exactly the "club of the best" Ries told CNBC he wanted to build, only at Nasdaq's scale.
The technology side mirrors the pattern. In October 2024, Nasdaq added the XVA Accelerator to its Calypso platform, a portfolio‑risk tool aimed at institutions that hold positions for quarters, not milliseconds. Seven months later, Nasdaq and AWS launched Eqlipse Trading, a cloud‑native matching engine already adopted by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Mexico's Grupo BMV, and the Philippine Stock Exchange. Then came structural bets: a March 2025 filing for 24‑hour, five‑day‑a‑week U.S. equity trading (targeting a second‑half 2026 launch) and, on March 18, 2026, SEC approval for tokenized settlement of select stocks — the first mainstream exchange nod to blockchain‑based clearing. Each move expands the time horizon over which capital can be deployed and settled, narrowing the operational gap LTSE tried to open with tenure‑based voting and long‑term shareholder incentives.
ThredUp's dual listing, with a primary listing on Nasdaq and a secondary listing on LTSE, illustrates the dynamic. The resale platform gets Nasdaq's liquidity and ESG tooling while borrowing LTSE's branding as a "long‑term" venue. Ries himself conceded the point: "We're not in a rush to make predictions about how [LTSE] is going to take over the world overnight." Nasdaq's Adena Friedman, the first woman to run a major U.S. exchange, has not publicly addressed LTSE by name, but the product cadence speaks louder than any quote.
ICE, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, appears in the competitive frame only by implication. The research surfaced no specific long‑term listing product or ESG data launch from ICE in the same window. For now, Nasdaq's counter‑moves are the measurable response — and they suggest the patient‑capital narrative has already been absorbed into the incumbent's roadmap.
The operational bar is rising in parallel. Three companies (Intercontinental Exchange (owner of NYSE), Nasdaq, and Cboe Global Markets) control 97 percent of on‑exchange flow, CNBC reported in 2020. That concentration means any new entrant must clear a regulatory and technical bar set by incumbents who have spent decades hardening their risk controls, surveillance systems, and clearing integrations.
LTSE's SEC approval in 2019 and full trading launch in September 2020 came alongside a wave of new exchanges: Members Exchange (MEMX), backed by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and Fidelity, planned a phased rollout starting September 21, 2020; MIAX Pearl Equities, from Miami International Holdings, debuted September 25, 2020. The SEC, then locked in a legal tussle with NYSE and Nasdaq over market‑data fees, signaled it wanted more competition. But the operational reality is unforgiving. Each exchange needs real‑time risk engines, pre‑trade controls, market‑data distribution, and regulatory reporting — all running at microsecond latency with zero tolerance for downtime.
Jonathan Kellner, MEMX's CEO, told CNBC in September 2020: "We are bringing more competition to the U.S. equity space, and that is what is needed now. Competition will bring pressure on fees and drive innovation in technology. We also want our members to have more of a voice in market structure." That "innovation in technology" is code for the engineering and risk stacks exchanges must build: matching engines, surveillance analytics, cyber resilience.
For frontier‑tech companies, the exchange's operational stability is not abstract. A listing venue that suffers an outage or a surveillance failure erodes the patient‑capital thesis LTSE sells. When Twilio delisted in 2022, it cited cost concerns; the exchange's thin volume (roughly 45 percent of the market operates on price/time priority, per the 2020 CNBC piece) means every basis point of operational overhead matters. LTSE's principles‑based listing standards also require listed companies to meet those requirements, a compliance burden that falls on the exchange's own regulatory‑affairs and legal teams.
The incumbents are not standing still. Nasdaq spokesperson Joe Christinat said in 2020: "We welcome new entrants, as we have been successfully competing in the US equity markets for nearly 50 years and work every day to add value to our clients." A source close to NYSE told the same outlet: "This is not like 15 years ago, when the NYSE was a technological laggard. They will fight fiercely for market share."
Piper Sandler's Rich Repetto offered a blunt assessment: "We don't need them, but they will still get created because it is a way to pressure costs lower." Cost pressure flows through to talent budgets. Exchanges that cannot automate risk workflows (margin calculations, position limits, cross‑market surveillance) will see their cost structures diverge from the incumbents' scale advantages. As LTSE and its peers chase the long‑horizon issuers that frontier tech produces, the operational bar rises, and the talent required to clear it becomes a competitive variable in its own right.
The Road to 2030
LTSE enters its next phase with a capital base reinforced by the 2019 Series B and a regulatory framework settled since the SEC's approval. Trading launched in September 2020, but the exchange's trajectory since illustrates the structural headwinds any new venue faces in a market where three incumbents control nearly all on‑exchange flow. As of thredUP's dual listing in May 2023, LTSE's roster stood at two active names — Asana, which provided the first meaningful liquidity signal, and thredUP, the first consumer brand to adopt the dual‑listing model. Twilio's 2022 delisting, attributed to cost concerns, remains a data point the exchange's value proposition must overcome.
Ries has consistently refused to attach numerical targets to growth. "We're not in a rush to make such predictions, because we only want the best," he told CNBC in May 2023. "For us, this is about creating a real club of the best of the best to show that there's a new way forward." That framing (quality over quantity, patience over pace) aligns with the exchange's stated mission, but it also means conventional metrics like revenue run‑rate, user‑base expansion, or listed‑company count lack public forecasts from the exchange itself. No analyst consensus on LTSE‑specific financial projections appears in the public record; the exchange does not file quarterly earnings, and its private ownership structure keeps revenue, trading‑volume, and fee‑income figures opaque.
What can be grounded is the pipeline logic Ries has described repeatedly. The initial target is private companies preparing to go public, firms that want to signal long‑term orientation from day one. The secondary ambition is to persuade already‑public companies to dual‑list or migrate, a move Ries has called "an act of very bold leadership" given the governance commitments LTSE requires: published long‑term policies, board mission pledges, and a ban on tying executive pay to short‑term financial metrics. thredUP's dual listing, executed while the company reported a $92.3 million net loss for 2022, demonstrates that the model can attract a company under earnings pressure precisely because the exchange's standards are designed to contextualize quarterly results within a longer narrative. Whether that becomes a repeatable pattern depends on how many founders and boards share Reinhart's stated horizon: "We're here to make a difference. Not for two or three years, but for 20, 40, 50 years."
The competitive response from incumbents adds another variable. Nasdaq has launched ESG data products and long‑term‑focused listing frameworks in recent years, aiming to capture the same narrative without ceding market share. MEMX, backed by the same Wall Street heavyweights, launched in 2020 with a pure cost‑cutting pitch (targeting 10–20 percent of the price/time‑priority segment) and has grown volume by undercutting fees rather than redefining governance. LTSE's differentiation remains structural: it is the only such exchange with a mission explicitly centered on patient capital, and its listing standards are binding, not voluntary. That distinction may matter more as institutional allocators (particularly pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles) formalize long‑horizon mandates.
Absent public financials, the most concrete forward indicator is the exchange's own product roadmap. The $50 million raise was sized to fund "administrative and technical steps" toward full operational readiness, per the 2019 SEC approval release, and to build the compliance and market‑data infrastructure that a national exchange requires.
Qualitatively, the next five years hinge on three questions: how many private companies choose LTSE as their primary or dual venue at IPO; whether any large‑cap incumbent follows thredUP's lead and dual‑lists; and whether the exchange can generate enough trading revenue to cover its cost base without compromising the fee structure that keeps it attractive to long‑horizon issuers. Ries's board (80 percent women, a governance signal in itself) has signaled comfort with a slow build. "It's always been easier to do these things later," he said in May 2023. "Sometimes companies need to lead and show people it can be done." The thredUP listing is that proof point. The next one will decide whether the club remains a symbol or becomes a market.
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