How Locke Works

Locke is the infrastructure layer between your master fund and your investors. We handle tokenization, compliance, capital call allocation, LP reporting, K-1 generation, and secondary market operations. You upload a quarterly Excel file. We do everything else.

Section 1

The Architecture: Feeder Fund Model

Locke creates five feeder funds for each master fund on the platform. Each feeder is a separate legal entity that invests directly into your master fund. The five feeders segment investors by type:

AI
Accredited Individuals
FO
Family Offices
RIA
RIAs & Wealth Platforms
INST
Institutional
QP
Qualified Purchasers

Your Master Fund

No structural changes required

INVESTS INTO

AI Feeder

FO Feeder

RIA Feeder

INST Feeder

QP Feeder

Token Holders

Token Holders

Token Holders

Token Holders

Token Holders

Why this structure? Each feeder operates as a parallel 3(c)(1) fund with its own 100-beneficial-owner limit. Five feeders means capacity for up to 500 individual investors per master fund without triggering Investment Company Act registration. It also provides clean investor segmentation — your family office LPs are in a different vehicle than your accredited individuals — and regulatory clarity for each investor class.

What you report: Master fund level plus feeder fund balances. That’s it. Locke handles everything downstream: pro-rata allocation to individual token holders within each feeder, ILPA-compliant capital call and distribution notices, cap table management including secondary trades, and individual K-1 tax documents. You never interact with individual investors unless you choose to.

Section 2

Tokenization: ERC-3643 on Polygon

Each LP’s fund interest is represented as a compliant digital security token on the Polygon blockchain. This is not a public crypto token. It is not traded on Coinbase. It cannot be held in a random wallet.

Locke uses ERC-3643, the permissioned token standard designed specifically for regulated securities. Only investors who have completed KYC/AML verification and accreditation checks can hold these tokens. The smart contract enforces this at the protocol level — an unverified wallet literally cannot receive tokens.

Polygon Blockchain

Institutional-grade, low-cost, Ethereum-compatible. Used by Franklin Templeton, JPMorgan, and the Singapore Monetary Authority.

Fixed Unit Model

1 token = $1 of commitment. Simple, auditable, no fractional complexity. A $500K commitment = 500,000 tokens.

Burn-and-Mint Settlement

Secondary trades settle via burn-and-mint: seller's tokens are burned, buyer's tokens are minted. Clean cap table, full on-chain audit trail.

No Crypto for GPs

The GP never touches blockchain. No wallets, no gas fees, no key management. Your experience is uploading an Excel file and approving trades in a web portal.

The bottom line: Tokenization is the infrastructure layer, not the product. Your LPs don’t need to understand blockchain any more than they need to understand how SWIFT transfers work. They see a clean portal with their holdings, documents, and transaction history. The blockchain just makes the cap table immutable, auditable, and instantly transferable.

Section 3

GP Reporting: What You Do vs. What Locke Does

Your only recurring obligation is to complete and upload the standardized 6-tab reporting template at quarterly intervals. The template covers:

1Fund Summary
2Portfolio Companies
3Capital Activity
4Feeder Fund Balances
5Documents
6Announcements

GP Uploads Excel

15 minutes, once per quarter

Locke Processes

8 engines run automatically

LPs See Updates

Portal, notices, documents

Once you upload, Locke runs 8 processing engines automatically:

Capital Call Engine

Pro-rata allocation to individual token holders within each feeder

Distribution Engine

Distribution amounts per LP based on ownership percentage

NAV Engine

Updated NAV per token across all feeders

Notice Engine

ILPA-compliant capital call and distribution notices to each LP

Exchange Engine

Updated secondary market pricing and trade matching

Tax Engine

Individual K-1 documents for every LP

Feeder Fund Engine

Feeder-level financial statements and compliance reporting

GP Upload Engine

Data validation, normalization, and error checking

Section 4

The Locke Exchange: Secondary Market

LPs can list their tokenized fund interests for sale on the Locke Exchange. This gives your investors something PE has historically lacked: a path to liquidity before the fund winds down. For you, it means happier LPs and a new revenue stream.

Every trade requires GP approval. You retain full control over your cap table. No trade settles without your explicit sign-off. You can reject any trade for any reason — ROFR, investor quality, concentration limits, or simple preference.

Tiered Transaction Fees

Transaction SizeFeeGP Revenue Share (20%)
Up to $1M3.0%0.60%
$1M – $2.5M2.5%0.50%
$2.5M – $10M2.0%0.40%
Above $10M1.5%0.30%

GP revenue share is permanent — every trade, every tier, for the lifetime of the fund on the platform.

Settlement uses the burn-and-mint model: the seller’s tokens are burned, and new tokens are minted to the buyer. This is atomic — it happens in a single blockchain transaction. No transfer agent delays, no paperwork, no reconciliation headaches. The cap table updates in real time.

On structural integrity: Locke’s blockchain-native architecture eliminates the conflict of interest inherent in platforms that act as both cap table provider and secondary marketplace. When the cap table lives on a centralized database and the marketplace operator controls that database, the operator has both motive and means to manipulate. On Locke, the blockchain is the cap table. There is no separate database to conflict with. Every entry is cryptographically signed, timestamped, and publicly auditable. The platform cannot alter the record without detection.

Section 5

Investor Qualification & Compliance

Locke handles the entire investor qualification workflow under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D. This means all investors must be verified accredited investors — not self-certified (with one exception, below). You never touch accreditation paperwork.

Self-Certification Path

For investments of $200K or more, investors may self-certify accredited status per the March 2025 SEC no-action letter. This streamlines onboarding for your most significant LPs while remaining fully compliant.

KYC/AML Verification

Identity verification, sanctions screening, and anti-money-laundering checks are built into the onboarding flow. Every investor is verified before they can view fund materials or make a commitment.

NDA-Gated Dataroom

Fund documents are only accessible after an investor completes qualification and executes an NDA. No browsing confidential materials without clearing compliance. You control what goes in the dataroom.

Investor Segmentation

Accredited individuals, qualified purchasers, family offices, RIAs, and institutional investors are automatically routed to the correct feeder fund based on their qualification status.

Section 6

The Founding Partner Program

We are onboarding 10–15 GPs as Founding Partners. These are the firms that will shape the platform — their feedback drives product decisions, their funds anchor the marketplace, and their success is our proof of concept. The program is intentionally small. We want deep partnerships, not a long tail.

Advisory Equity

0.25–0.50% advisory shares with 24-month milestone vesting. Your success is aligned with the platform's growth.

Permanent Revenue Share

20% of all secondary market transaction fees on your fund. Every trade, every tier, for the lifetime of the fund on Locke.

Zero Setup Costs

Onboarding fees waived entirely. 50% discount on platform fees for Years 1 and 2.

Priority Product Input

Direct line to the product team. Feature requests from Founding Partners are prioritized. You're building this with us.

What we ask in return: Upload quarterly data via our standardized template. Be willing to provide candid product feedback. Be referenceable for future GP prospects once you’re satisfied with the platform. That’s the full list.

Section 7

Security & Infrastructure

AWS Cloud Infrastructure

ECS/Fargate containers, RDS PostgreSQL, S3 object storage. The same AWS primitives used by Goldman Sachs, Capital One, and the SEC itself.

Encryption

All data encrypted at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3). Database connections are encrypted. API traffic is HTTPS-only.

SOC 2 Compliance

SOC 2 Type II audit is underway. We designed the platform with SOC 2 controls from day one — this is a documentation exercise, not a remediation effort.

Role-Based Access

GPs only see their own funds. LPs only see their own holdings. Admin actions are logged and auditable. No cross-tenant data leakage is architecturally possible.

No crypto wallet required. Investors authenticate with standard email and password. Two-factor authentication is available. The blockchain layer is entirely abstracted — your LPs interact with a modern web application, not a DeFi interface.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to Explore?

Join 10–15 GPs shaping the future of private markets infrastructure. Or schedule a call to discuss how Locke fits your fund.