The Equal Opportunity for All Investors Act
Private markets are engineered to be exclusive.
The clearest expression of that design is the accredited investor definition. In the United States, you generally need a net worth above $1 million excluding your home, or income above $200,000, to participate in most private offerings. It is a wealth test, not a knowledge test. It assumes that the ability to evaluate a sophisticated investment tracks the size of your bank balance.
For a generation of operators, engineers, analysts, and founders who understand these markets intimately but sit below an arbitrary income line, the message has been consistent: not for you.
The Equal Opportunity for All Investors Act sets out to change that.
What Bill Does
Introduced by Representative Mike Flood (R-Neb.) alongside a bipartisan group of co-sponsors: Cleo Fields (D-La.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Sarah McBride (D-Del.), and Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.).
The bill creates a new route to accredited investor status. Rather than clearing a wealth or income threshold, an individual could qualify by passing an examination established by the SEC and administered by FINRA, demonstrating real competence in how private securities, disclosures, and risk work.
Flood's framing of the principle is one we share almost word for word: access to capital markets should rest on merit and knowledge, not just wealth.
The bill has real momentum. It passed the House with unanimous, bipartisan support in July 2025 and was later folded into the broader INVEST Act package. It now awaits Senate consideration and is not yet law, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Why Hecto Champions It
Hecto exists to make the inaccessible accessible. The enemy we have always named is structural exclusion, the architecture that keeps the best opportunities behind a wall most people were never given a door to. The accredited investor wealth test is that wall in its purest form.
A merit-based pathway does not lower the bar. It changes what the bar measures. It says an investor's right to participate should rest on whether they understand the risk, not on whether they were already wealthy enough to be presumed to. That is the conviction that runs through everything we build: that access should be earned through knowledge, and that the people who study these markets deserve a way in.
We are not neutral observers of this debate. We are champions of it.
The US is Laying Rails
The bill does not stand alone. It arrives alongside a wider shift in US policy toward private markets - including regulatory work to define how tokenized securities are treated, and the broader migration of real world assets onto on-chain infrastructure. Read together, these moves sketch the outline of something larger: an environment in which qualified individuals can access private companies, and in which that access can increasingly be issued, settled, and traded on-chain.
Access reform answers who can participate and tokenization answers how.
Put the two together and you have the architecture for genuinely democratized private markets - liquid, transparent, and open to participants on the basis of competence rather than connections.
The United States moving first here matters.
It is the deepest capital market in the world, and where it sets the terms, others calibrate.
A Clear Global Shift
We read this bill as more than a domestic policy story. It is an early indicator of a global shift.
The pressures driving it are not unique to America. Companies everywhere are staying private longer and compounding more of their value out of public view; investors everywhere are asking why a wealth test should decide who participates in the defining companies of the era. As one major jurisdiction reframes access around knowledge, the question it raises will travel.
Hecto was built for that world from the start - Canton native, compliance-first, and structured across jurisdictions rather than tied to any single one.
We did not build for the rules of one country. We built for the direction every serious market is moving in. When access opens, the infrastructure has to already be there.
What this means for Hecto Vaults
The reform speaks directly to what we are building next.
The upcoming Hecto Vaults are designed to give qualified participants quote based access to single private companies, routed through a regulated, bankruptcy-remote structure. Today, a door like that opens only for those who already clear the accredited or qualified investor bar, and that bar has almost always been a measure of wealth.
A merit based standard changes the math. By letting individuals qualify through demonstrated knowledge rather than net worth alone, a bill like this would greatly widen the pool of people who could participate in products like Vaults - not by removing the safeguards, but by changing what earns you through them. Every analyst, operator, and sophisticated allocator who understands these assets but sits below an arbitrary income line becomes a potential qualified participant. The gate stays; the test behind it finally measures the right thing.
We are building Vaults for exactly that world - structured, compliant access for eligible participants, with KYC and qualification applied where required, available by enquiry when it launches.
When the door opens, the infrastructure will already be there. And a broader, knowledge based standard for who qualifies makes the room behind it far larger.
It pays to be early.
