coindesk.com
Anthropic’s IPO is still weeks away, but traders are already betting on it with borrowed money.
Two contracts on Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto exchange whose trades settle on a public blockchain, make that possible: Entropy’s ANTH and trade.xyz’s ANT.
While Anthropic hasn’t commented publicly on the contracts, its help page says that anyone claiming to sell its shares to the public through “forward contracts,” tokenized securities, or other mechanisms is likely offering something worthless.
The Entropy and trade.xyz contracts, which are perpetual swaps, don’t deliver shares or claim to represent them. Anthropic hasn’t said whether its comment extends to perpetual contracts, which are futures agreements that never expire.
“Every other 24/7 tradfi market on Hyperliquid mirrors a price that already exists somewhere else BUT pre-IPO markets create one where none has ever traded, which is why I believe they are the most revolutionary product trade[XYZ] has shipped,” DeFi researcher Petro Dmytrilev wrote on X. “An IPOP conveys no shares, no allocation, no voting rights, no claim against the issuer, price exposure only.”
Until the shares start trading, the only link to Anthropic is trader expectations. With no public price to copy, the operator sets one. Each pre-IPO market launches at a price the operator chooses.
How the contracts work
Perps use a funding rate, a small periodic payment between longs and shorts, to keep the contract near the reference price. Longs are traders betting on an increase, shorts are betting on a decline.
Entropy’s ANTH is priced by valuation, with each $1 of price representing $1 billion of company value. A reading near 1,880, therefore, values Anthropic around $1.9 trillion.
ANT references one share of Anthropic’s Class A stock. The price follows a 30-minute moving average driven by resting orders on the order book. Trade.xyz uses “discovery bounds,” which hold the price within a band around a reference point that can reset only a limited number of times. For pre-IPO markets, the company typically damps the rate to 1% of its standard level.
ANT’s debut was rough. Hyperliquid data showed it opening near $138 at 9 a.m. ETbefore dropping to around $110 by about 11:50 a.m. on $8.7 million of volume and $2.2 million of open interest. The contract allows up to 10-fold leverage, which means a 10% move against a position wipes out its collateral.
