Carta rebuilt onchain for the programmable economy
obolos enables startups to issue shares, manage their cap table, issue options and other convertible instruments.
The predicament
Startups do this today via a fragmented, rent-extracting stack of Carta, lawyers, spreadsheets and PDFs. Carta and Pulley alone charge $3k–$75k(!) a year to manage a cap table and model conversions, and any bespoke workflow means bending to their product.
99.9% of companies are private, yet none of them are served by the tokenisation wave. They're stuck with manual transfers, slow and expensive checks, and counterparties extracting rent at every step; the prime reason non-public equity is illiquid.
The future
obolos makes your shares programmable: modular securities rules run before every transfer, so founders, shareholders and institutions all work from one verifiable source of truth, without the duplicated cost and friction of today's tooling.
Companies get all the tools they need during their equity journey. Shareholders (employees, investors and their lawyers) get real, verifiable equity ownership and unparalleled infrastructure to build their workflows on.
Institutions no longer spend man-years and millions reconstructing transfer history via scattered PDFs or incomplete databases.
The result: equity agreements that enforce themselves, ownership that's verifiable rather than promised, and compliance verified once and trusted by all.
All of this at the marginal cost of a cryptographic proof.
How?
ZK: confidential SAFE/note conversion during priced rounds.
FHE (Fhenix): allows us to offer selective disclosure and confidentiality.
ZeroDev: allows us to offer a Web2 experience by abstracting fees and offering social connect.
OpenZeppelin: contracts form the basis of our stack and our roles
CMTAT: for modular tokenisation standard.
Alchemy: for our indexing and blockchain querying.
We are natively on Arbitrum and currently live on Arbitrum Sepolia.
Links:
We received great guidance for Product and GTM and we are grateful for this. For our initial client base we are feature complete, so we thought we would have a bit of fun. We built an AI agent (I know another one) that allows you to query your cap table ("How much will FounderX own post Series A at $45m valuation?"), or your portfolio ("If I exercise those options what's my P&L post tax-treatment?"). It worked much better than we expected. You can easily model future fundraises and summarize investor updates. It will become a core feature of our offering.
After our sessions we realized we need to hasten our pre-seed raise so we can expand our GTM and go to more events, accelerators and incubators.
