EasyA has been independently valued at $1.1 billion as it prepares for a direct public listing in the first half of next year, co-founder and CEO Philip Kwok told CoinDesk in an interview Tuesday. The company has already filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

That number comes with an asterisk. The valuation was set by a third party using audited financials, operating performance and comparisons with public companies. It does not guarantee what investors will pay once the shares trade.

EasyA is not taking the traditional IPO route. A direct listing lets existing shareholders sell stock publicly without the company raising fresh capital. That structure demands the independent valuation Kwok described.

"Given we are going public, and we're going public via a direct listing, that means that we of course need to have an independent valuation," Kwok said. He founded the company with his brother Dominic Kwok, who serves as chief operating officer.

What does the listing change for investors?

The offering would hand public markets a business that sits one layer behind crypto and AI themselves. EasyA helps blockchain networks and AI companies attract developers and ship applications, rather than selling tokens or models. It is a picks-and-shovels proposition, and the listing will test how much appetite institutional investors have for it.

The numbers behind the valuation rest on two years of audits by accounting firm PDF. EasyA says its app serves more than 1.3 million users, from software developers to people building with AI tools. Its partners include Ripple and Solana, working with both through educational programs and hackathons.

The hackathon pipeline has produced at least one notable alumnus. Walden Yan, who participated in EasyA's early hackathons, went on to co-found Cognition, the company behind the Devin AI coding agent. Cognition is now valued at roughly $48 billion after a $2 billion raise led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.

What about the tokenized shares?

EasyA wants its equity available onchain, potentially from the first day of public trading. Dominic Kwok confirmed the ambition plainly.

"That's definitely on the roadmap," he said of the tokenization plans.

The company has not disclosed how the tokenized shares would be issued or traded. That gap matters, because tokenized equities are moving from crypto-native experiment to mainstream infrastructure. Robinhood has built a blockchain for tokenized stocks, and analysts expect the SEC's ongoing work on tokenized securities to create openings for brokers, custodians and blockchain infrastructure providers.

If EasyA executes the plan, it would arrive on public markets as one of the earlier tests of tokenized equity distribution for a listed company. The operational questions — custody, transfer restrictions, which chain settles the shares — remain unanswered for now.

Beyond the developer community

The listing is not the only strategic shift. EasyA Labs, the company's expansion arm, is developing tokenization projects and applications involving AI agents. That pushes the business past its original developer-education core into building products of its own.

So what does this change for the broader market? A direct listing with onchain ambitions would give regulators and investors a live case study in how tokenized public equity actually functions at listing, not years after the fact.

The timeline to watch is concrete: EasyA targets the first half of 2027 for its debut, pending SEC review of its draft registration. Whether the tokenized-share plan survives that review process will say a great deal about how far the SEC is willing to stretch market structure for onchain securities.