OpenAI And SpaceX Exposure, From A Phone

What we talked about.

In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Joan Alavedra, a Barcelona based co-founder of Farao and Openfort, about building self-custodial trading infrastructure for tokenized assets. Joan traces his path from studying engineering in Barcelona and finance in Paris, through the Rocket Internet era in Berlin, to launching Openfort three years ago as wallet infrastructure for stablecoins and tokenized assets. He explains how that work evolved into Farao, a mobile app that lets users trade tokenized assets, including pre IPO exposure to companies like OpenAI and SpaceX, directly from their phone while keeping custody of their own keys. Joan discusses lessons from early gaming and crypto experiments, why self-custody remained non-negotiable even when it slowed the product down, and why the team chose to build on Hyperliquid. He also describes how tokenization is becoming more social, letting a profit and loss card function like a shareable asset the way an image does on other platforms. The conversation closes with Joan outlining Farao's go to market strategy through trading communities and user generated content, with a follow up conversation planned for two weeks later.

Farao co-founder Joan explains how self-custodial trading lets anyone get pre-IPO OpenAI and SpaceX exposure from their phone.

The questions, and the answers.

What are you building, and why should people care about Farao?

I'm Joan, one of the co-founders at Farao. We also run another project called Openfort, which we started three years ago building wallet infrastructure for stablecoin wallets and tokenized digital assets. We saw an opportunity to bring digital assets to a more retail friendly audience, so we built Farao, a mobile trading app that lets you invest in anything tokenized directly from your phone in a self-custodial way.

You studied engineering in Barcelona and finance in Paris. Which education turned out more useful?

They were useful in different ways. Engineering helped me craft my own mind and set up a good foundation for working through problems from first principles. Finance was more of a long standing interest from my heart, something I decided to pursue after being exposed to different topics once I grew up. It is useful now because it lets me talk directly to my audience and clients about the things I care about.

What was the biggest lesson from your Rocket Internet days in Berlin?

At the time, ideas mattered less than they do today with AI. What mattered most was execution, especially distribution and how you target specific geographies. Back then it was much harder to launch something like Airbnb worldwide than it is now. During Rocket Internet times you could copy a model like Airbnb in Europe and try to out compete the original using the same tactics applied locally.

Why was self-custody a line you would not cross, even when it made the product harder?

If you hold users' keys, you take on liability and compliance burdens, and you become a target for cyber attacks. We believed we were at a stage where custody problems could be solved with cryptography instead. That let us expand faster into new geographies while guaranteeing users that if Farao ever disappeared, they would still hold their keys and could move or sell their assets elsewhere, unlike an FTX style event.

Settling on Hyperliquid was a bet on somebody else's chain. What did you have to believe about it first?

It came down to two things. First, how fast the underlying technology and team could move, and Hyperliquid had a track record of shipping spot markets, then perpetual futures, then prediction markets very quickly. Second, how fast adoption and liquidity were growing, because even the fastest chain is useless without enough liquidity for people to actually buy and sell. Hyperliquid showed strength on both fronts, so we built there first.

How does pre-IPO exposure to names like OpenAI and SpaceX actually work from a phone?

It relies on secondary private share transactions at the latest priced funding rounds, where a market maker brings liquidity and matches supply and demand. For example, if OpenAI is valued at a certain price privately but the market prices it double, that becomes an interesting social mechanic. It is essentially price discovery for something that is still private, testing what it would actually be worth if it went public.

You mentioned the new meta is tokenization and making it social. When did that click for you?

Historically social networks have centered on an asset like text, an image, or a video. It's exciting to bring a social network where the asset is a P&L card or a portfolio, because that becomes a new primitive people interact with. Once you give people a P&L card the way Instagram gave them an image, the first thing that happens is copy trading and commenting on someone's thesis, and it evolves from there.