NakedPnL vs Public.com: Verified Performance vs Social Brokerage
Public.com is a US social-investing brokerage with community profiles. NakedPnL is a publisher of cryptographically chained verified performance.
- Public.com is a US-based, no-PFOF brokerage with a social feed, follower model, and a deliberately non-hierarchical community design.
- NakedPnL is a publisher of verified performance: SHA-256 chained, daily-anchored to Bitcoin, with multi-venue ingest from crypto exchanges, IBKR, and prediction markets.
- Public.com's community is conversational and explicitly does not rank by performance. NakedPnL's registry is exactly the opposite — performance is the central artifact, and it is cryptographically verifiable.
Verdict at a glance
Public.com is a US retail brokerage that has built a social layer on top of trading. Members can follow other members, see portfolios (subject to privacy controls), discuss positions, and access a feed designed by the company to be non-hierarchical with respect to performance. Public has expanded into bonds, treasuries, alternative assets, and AI-assisted features such as Alpha and what it calls an 'agentic brokerage' surface.
NakedPnL is not a brokerage and not a social network. It connects to venues via read-only credentials and publishes a verified TWR record per trader, hashed in a SHA-256 chain and Merkle-anchored daily to Bitcoin. There is no order routing, no trade execution, no follower mechanic in the brokerage sense. The only social primitive on NakedPnL is 'track' — viewers can monitor a verified record without any execution coupling.
What they do differently
Public.com's design is explicitly community-oriented. The product team has stated publicly that the feed is intentionally not built around hierarchical performance ranking — the goal is conversation, not leaderboards. Profile visibility, portfolio visibility, and discussion participation are subject to user controls. Trade execution happens within the regulated brokerage subsidiary.
NakedPnL's design is the inverse: the central artifact is performance, computed deterministically as TWR with Decimal.js precision, and the verification model is cryptographic. The platform doesn't host conversations, doesn't allow order routing, and doesn't position itself as a social product. It is a publisher and a registry — the pre-DD layer for serious viewers, not a social feed for retail discussion.
Feature comparison
| Criterion | NakedPnL | Public.com |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Verified-performance publisher / registry | US retail brokerage with social investing community |
| Custody model | None (read-only connections) | Brokerage custody at the regulated entity (ST Invest LLC and partners) |
| API access model | Read-only API keys; broker tokens; wallet sigs | Direct execution + brokerage app |
| Verification mechanism | SHA-256 chain + daily Bitcoin OpenTimestamps anchor | Brokerage-record reporting; no public cryptographic chain |
| Independent re-verification | Yes — browser-side SHA-256 re-derivation | No — trust in Public's reporting |
| Public registry / leaderboards | Public registry of opted-in verified traders | Profiles are followable; explicitly not performance-ranked |
| Supported asset classes | Crypto, equities (IBKR), prediction markets (Kalshi, Polymarket) | US stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, bonds, treasuries, alternatives |
| Performance metric | Time-weighted return (TWR), Decimal.js precision | Standard P&L; performance not surfaced as ranking |
| Cost to traders | Free tier; paid publisher tiers | Standard brokerage account; some paid tiers (e.g. Premium) |
| Cost to viewers | Free public read | Brokerage account required for full social features |
| Regulatory category | Publisher of verified data | FINRA/SIPC-member broker-dealer (via ST Invest LLC) |
| Open-source methodology | TWR + hash methodology with re-derivation snippets | Brokerage operations follow regulatory rules; no public TWR spec |
| Privacy model | GDPR-aligned PublicConsent; opt-in and withdrawable | User controls profile and portfolio visibility |
| Order replication / copy | No — disabled by feature flag | No — Public deliberately does not auto-copy |
| Geographic availability | Broadly accessible globally; venue-level restrictions where they apply | US-focused brokerage product |
Use cases
- US retail investor who wants commission-free stock + bond + treasury access plus a social feed: Public.com fits.
- Multi-venue trader (crypto + IBKR equities + prediction markets) wanting one verified TWR record: NakedPnL.
- Allocator running due diligence on a candidate manager: NakedPnL's chain re-verification is the differentiator.
- User who wants to learn from other investors via discussion rather than performance ranking: Public's design is purpose-built for that.
- Trader who wants their record to remain re-verifiable independent of any single brokerage's continued operation: NakedPnL's chain plus Bitcoin anchoring is the right shape.
Pricing
Public.com runs the standard brokerage economics with a no-PFOF model and tiered features (some Premium-style add-ons exist for tools/insights). NakedPnL charges only on the publisher side: trader tiers (FREE / PRO / FUND_DESK plus the capped Founding Lifetime program). Public-side reading is free on NakedPnL — there is no follower role at all because there is no execution to follow.
Why this comparison is hard
Public.com is a regulated US brokerage with a community design philosophy that explicitly refuses to rank users by performance. NakedPnL is a non-custodial publisher whose entire reason to exist is to rank users by verified performance. Comparing them as competitors is misleading — they're different categories with different jobs to do. The fair framing: Public.com is a brokerage built around conversation; NakedPnL is a publisher built around verifiable track records.