A personal account without a desk
On a professional trading desk, an opinion is never formed alone. Analysts, live news and colleagues constantly connect what is happening in the world to the markets you trade. Lihong Wang lived that environment as an options trader at Jane Street and IMC — two of the most demanding trading firms in the world — and then discovered how different trading felt on his own account. He was trying to follow everything himself, missing developments, and jumping between news feeds and trading apps. Having an opinion was easy; keeping up with the context was harder.
Wang's path to that insight started at Duke University, where he was president of his fraternity and grew the Duke Quant Finance Club from around 10 members to roughly 200. He has loved markets since he was a kid, he writes, and trained as a quant trader — a background that shows in Freeport's design. The app is not built around charts for their own sake. It is built around the workflow of a desk: follow the sources you trust, see what a story could mean for markets, and act before the context goes stale.
The other half of the founding story is a friendship. Wang's co-founder comes from a complementary path — ex-Huawei and ex-Capital One — and the two met in freshman year of college, stayed close ever since, and spent years sharing Thanksgivings and family vacations. In a memo laying out Freeport's vision, Wang describes the company as emerging as much from that alignment of values as from their skills: a mission-driven bet that the next wave of on-chain users will be long-term allocators, not day traders, and that they will only adopt decentralised finance when it feels legal, legible and low-effort.
Copy everyone, track everything
Freeport's headline feature is its answer to the desk's oldest shortcut: find someone good and follow what they do. Its proprietary AI sifts on-chain activity to find the top wallets worth copying, and copy trading lets users allocate capital to a trader's strategy, with positions scaled to their allocation. Users can stop copying whenever they choose and close remaining positions when ready — the point is delegation with an exit, not blind faith.
The same instinct shapes the news side of the app. Freeport pulls from social feeds, blogs, podcasts, news articles and discussion threads, then uses AI to filter noise and surface trading-relevant signals tied to the sources each user trusts. Instead of a feed that rewards engagement, the product is a feed that ends in a trade: explore the markets a story could affect, find traders whose strategies you want to follow, and act from the same screen. Portfolio tracking, charts and transaction history run on the Zerion API, which Freeport integrated to give users a real-time view of what they hold across chains.
That combination — a tradable news feed plus copy trading — is what Freeport launched on Product Hunt on 3 November 2026, under the tagline its team uses for the whole product: copy everyone, track everything. It is a deliberately broad promise, and the app's design is an attempt to make breadth usable: one account, one feed, and strategies that can be followed rather than researched from scratch.
Pre-IPO names and 50x leverage, in one app
Freeport's most attention-grabbing feature is access to markets most retail apps never touch. Users can take positions on private companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Anduril, Neuralink, Figure, Kalshi and Polymarket through pre-IPO perpetual futures or SPV-backed instruments — exposure to tomorrow's public companies before they list. Alongside that sit more than 400 stocks and crypto assets plus commodities, rates and foreign exchange, tradeable around the clock, including weekends, with leverage of up to 50x on supported markets and no KYC required for core trading.
The leverage deserves the warning the company itself prints: it magnifies losses as well as gains, and positions can be liquidated if margin falls too low. Derivative and third-party products may not confer ownership of the underlying assets, and pre-IPO exposures may not be audited or verified by Freeport. The app's content — news, social and trader posts, AI outputs — is informational only, not financial advice. That candour is part of the product's positioning: an internet-native investing platform for people who want fewer barriers, with the risks stated rather than buried.
Freeport launched its mobile app in early 2026, joined Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, and has been building out its integrations since — perpetual decentralised-exchange coverage, prediction markets and deeper protocol support are on the roadmap, alongside the portfolio infrastructure from Zerion. The business case is straightforward: collapse the distance between a world event and a market action, and let ordinary investors reach economic functions — pre-IPO equity, private credit — that blockchains make newly possible.
A decade-long friendship, now a YC company
It is easy to read Freeport as a feature list — copy trading, pre-IPO perps, leverage, a news feed — but Wang's own writing frames it as a values bet. In his founding memo he argues that the next wave of on-chain users will be long-term allocators who adopt decentralised finance only when it feels legal, legible and low-effort, and that investors should have a single, trusted interface to allocate across every major protocol. The company exists, he writes, to return to first principles and give ordinary investors access to real economic functions that blockchains make possible.
That framing also explains the company's operating choices. Moving revenue between on-chain and off-chain rails is a daily operational headache for a crypto-native business; in a case study with its banking provider Meow, Wang — identified there as Freeport's CEO — said the ability to move revenue almost instantly saves him hours per week. It is a small detail, but it captures the company's pitch in miniature: infrastructure that disappears, so the user can focus on the decision.
For a company that only recently entered Y Combinator and launched its app in early 2026, the open question is execution: whether copy trading built on AI-ranked wallets earns lasting trust, and whether pre-IPO exposure can scale without the verification problems the company itself discloses. What is not in doubt is the clarity of the bet. Wang spent his career on desks where information and action lived side by side; Freeport is his attempt to give every investor a desk of their own.
The playbook
- Collapse the distance between news and trade — Freeport's core loop turns a story from a trusted source into an actionable idea in the same app — no jumping between feeds, research tools and brokerages.
- Copy, don't just watch — Ranking on-chain wallets with AI and letting users mirror a strategy — scaled to their own allocation, with an exit at any time — turns observation into participation.
- Make private markets tradable — Pre-IPO exposure through perpetual futures and SPV-backed instruments gives ordinary investors a position in companies they could previously only read about.