Recently, I've been thinking about the topic of bear markets, and it's quite interesting. The CEO of Mysten Labs previously said that bear markets aren't that great, as they discourage many builders and users, leading to cash flow disruptions. But data tells us a different story.

A report from Lattice VC shows that over 80% of crypto startups that announced seed funding during the 2022 bear market are still actively building. What does this indicate? It suggests that if a project can survive the cash flow test of a bear market, it can instead focus on refining its product. Bear markets force teams to improve their survival capabilities, which in turn acts as a filtering mechanism.

Because of this, we've seen a wave of new entrepreneurial directions emerging during bear markets. Today, I want to discuss one of the hottest among them — the arbitrage opportunities in pre-market stock trading.

The demand for this market is real. Leading securities exchanges worldwide and crypto project teams are all involved in stock tokenization and pre-market trading. Especially considering the upcoming IPO boom of tech and crypto companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc., in 2026, the interest in pre-market trading will only grow.

Interestingly, the pricing of the same stock varies greatly across different platforms. I looked at data from several mainstream pre-market trading platforms and found a clear arbitrage opportunity.

Kalshi's pre-market price on PreStocks is about $397, but on Jarsy, it’s $545, a difference of $148, with a spread rate of 37%. Compared to the traditional finance platform Hiive, which quotes around $360, the difference exceeds $185. Polymarket's situation is even more exaggerated — $186 on PreStocks versus $280 on Jarsy, a $94 difference, with a spread rate over 50%. Even relatively stable stocks like SpaceX (xAI), priced at $666 on PreStocks and $591 on Tessera, show a $75 spread.

What do these numbers reflect? They reveal that there is no unified "pre-market arbitrage platform" in the market yet. Different platforms use different trading mechanisms (order books vs liquidity pools), leading to significant discrepancies in pricing.

This is precisely the opportunity for startups during a bear market. With liquidity still in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, building a platform dedicated to pre-market stock token arbitrage, earning profits through trading fees, LP fees, or capital spread arbitrage, is entirely feasible.

Bear markets push entrepreneurs to explore market gaps that traditional platforms overlook. And this pre-market stock arbitrage market is one of the most promising directions among them.