The family office has long outgrown a safe full of contracts and transformed into a set of specialized platforms. Through some, you enter Blackstone and KKR funds well below the institutional threshold; through others, you buy a stake in SpaceX long before IPO; a third group manages cap tables and assembles SPVs for club deals; a fourth holds crypto assets under banking licenses. Each platform is a choice of counterparty, jurisdiction, and disclosure regime, and understanding it requires the same diligence as analyzing a holding structure.
Below is a map of five categories with a breakdown of key platforms in each. The goal is simple: show how the market works and what to look for before entrusting a platform with money or data. For a family building a family office, this is part of the same architecture as legal entities, trusts, and accounts.
Five Categories of the "Gentleman's Set"
1. Access to Private Markets
Feeder platforms pool capital from several private investors into a single structure and use it to enter PE, VC, or private credit funds—below the institutional minimum of tens of millions. Moonfare provides access to funds with a threshold starting at €50,000 for portfolio funds and €100,000 for classic feeder funds, and through the ELTIF strategy in the app—from €10,000 for qualified retail investors. iCapital operates as a B2B "pipeline": managers connect clients to alternatives without building infrastructure from scratch. The investor buys a share in a feeder fund, which itself acts as an LP in the fund, so the fund's fees are layered with the platform's fees, and information rights and exit terms are determined by the feeder agreement.
2. Secondary Market for Private Shares
Here, stakes in pre-IPO companies and employee options are traded while the company itself remains private. Hiive displays an order book with visible bids and asks; Forge Global (NYSE: FRGE) has assembled a full stack—data, valuation, and execution; Nasdaq Private Market, after spinning off as an independent company in 2021, focuses on company-sponsored tenders—liquidity by invitation of the issuer itself. Legally, almost every transaction hinges on ROFR and company consent: shares are bound by transfer restrictions, and the stated "price" reflects the balance of supply and demand and diverges from the official business valuation.
3. Cap Table, Funds, and SPVs
This category manages ownership records and assembles structures for co-investments. Carta is the standard for cap table and fund administration (around $250 million and $100 million in revenue), but in January 2024 it exited secondary trading: a client accused the platform of using his cap table data to broker other people's shares, and the company shut down that line of business to preserve trust. AngelList and Sydecar handle syndicates and "club" deals; Sydecar promises fixed pricing and assembly without carry on administration. An SPV itself is a separate legal entity (usually a Delaware LLC) for a single transaction, and the cap table remains a register that reflects rights but does not replace corporate documents.
4. Institutional-Grade Crypto Custody
Institutional custody of digital assets rests on licensing and technology—these are different layers. Anchorage Digital received the first federal trust charter from the OCC in January 2021 and remained the only crypto bank with such status for several years; in 2025, the OCC issued similar charters to Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, Paxos, and Circle—the monopoly ended. Coinbase Prime offers custody and prime brokerage from a public company (NASDAQ: COIN), Kraken holds assets through a Wyoming SPDI banking license. Fireblocks occupies a separate niche: it's an MPC storage technology deployed by exchanges and custodians themselves, and it has no custodial license of its own. For a manager, the key question is who qualifies as a qualified custodian under the Investment Advisers Act, and who is merely a technology provider.
5. Alternative Assets
Platforms in this category securitize what was previously illiquid: art, wine, collectible assets. Masterworks buys a painting by Banksy or Warhol, registers it to a separate LLC, and sells shares in that LLC through Reg A+—essentially a mini-IPO with an offering circular filed with the SEC; entry starts at $500, holding horizon 3–10 years, limited liquidity through an internal secondary market. The investor owns a share in the company that owns the painting, while the manager controls the asset and timing of sale.
How to Read a Platform: Counterparty, Jurisdiction, Disclosure
Any of these platforms can be analyzed along three axes. Counterparty: who actually owns the assets—a bank with a trust license, a broker, a technology layer, or an LLC for a single object. Jurisdiction: where the structure is registered and which law and bankruptcy regime it is subject to—Delaware, Wyoming, EU, or offshore, and what economic substance backs it. Disclosure: what reports and information rights the investor receives—from a full offering circular under Reg A+ to a sparse cap table extract. The answers to these three questions say more about a platform than its brand.
Regulation: Who Is Even Allowed
Access to most platforms depends on investor status. In the US, this is an accredited investor—annual income of $200,000 ($300,000 for a household) or capital exceeding $1 million excluding primary residence; for the most exclusive funds, the qualified purchaser threshold is added, starting at $5 million in investments. In the EU, there is a division into professional and semi-professional investors, and the ELTIF 2.0 reform significantly lowered the entry threshold for retail. Custodians have their own filter: qualified custodian status under the Investment Advisers Act determines who may hold client assets—which is why federal and Wyoming licenses in crypto are so highly valued.
💡 The qualification threshold is often met through structure: a stake in a family holding or fund allows one to act as a single qualified participant where the bar would be unattainable individually. This explains the choice of a feeder or SPV when entering private markets.
What Has Changed in the Last Couple of Years
The platform market is changing rapidly. Carta exited secondary trading in 2024 after a data scandal and focused on cap table and fund administration. Nasdaq Private Market has operated as an independent company since 2021 with support from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. In crypto, 2025 broke Anchorage's monopoly: several players received federal trust charters from the OCC, and institutional custody ceased to be a one-bank story. In parallel, ELTIF 2.0 in Europe opened private markets to retail. The overall vector is more access and simultaneously more regulation.
🍓 The main skill of this entire series is to analyze the category first, then the brand. "Exchange" and "qualified custodian" are different legal entities; a feeder fund gives a share in someone else's structure with its own layer of fees; "price" on the secondary market shows demand, while business valuation is calculated separately. A platform is only as good as its counterparty, jurisdiction, and disclosure are clear.