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1. Anthropic IPO perpetual contracts arrive on Hyperliquid
Traders are wagering on the Anthropic IPO with borrowed money before a single share exists on a public market. On October 31, two perpetual contracts tied to the artificial intelligence company were trading on Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange whose trades settle on a public blockchain. One is Entropy's ANTH, the other is trade.xyz's ANT, and the second fell about 20% during its first hour of trading. Neither product is backed by Anthropic shares.
The listing itself is still weeks away. That gap is what makes the contracts notable: they let participants take leveraged long or short positions on an outcome that cannot yet be observed in any regulated market, and they do so around the clock on a crypto venue that U.S. residents are barred from using.
To follow the story, it helps to separate three things that are easy to conflate. The first is Anthropic's own stock offering, which will be priced by the company and its banks. The second is the market price that forms once shares begin trading. The third is the crypto contracts described here, which are side bets between traders that happen to reference the first two. A gain or loss on ANT or ANTH has no bearing on how much Anthropic raises or on who ends up owning its equity.
2. How do the ANT and ANTH contracts work?
Both products are perpetual swaps, a form of futures agreement that never expires. A perpetual stays close to its reference price through a funding rate, a periodic payment exchanged between traders who bet on a rise (longs) and those who bet on a fall (shorts). The contracts do not deliver shares and do not claim to represent them.
ANTH is priced by company valuation: each $1 of price corresponds to $1 billion of value. A reading near 1,880 therefore implies a valuation of about $1.9 trillion. ANT instead tracks the price of one share of Anthropic's Class A stock. Its price follows a 30-minute moving average that is driven by resting orders on the order book.
Trade.xyz also applies what it calls discovery bounds, which keep the price inside a band around a reference point. The reference point can be reset only a limited number of times. For pre-IPO markets, the rate is typically reduced to 1% of the standard level. Leverage on ANT runs as high as 10x, which means a 10% move against a position is enough to wipe out its collateral.
The funding rate is the mechanism that keeps a perpetual honest. When the contract trades above its reference price, longs pay shorts, which discourages further buying; when it trades below, shorts pay longs. In a mature market this keeps the swap anchored to the asset it follows. In a pre-IPO market there is no external asset to anchor to, which is why the moving-average pricing and the discovery bounds carry so much weight.
3. What happened in the first hour of trading?
ANT opened near $138 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on October 31. By about 11:50 a.m. it had dropped to roughly $110. Trading volume reached $8.7 million and open interest stood at $2.2 million, a figure that reflects the value of positions still outstanding. Another measure cited puts open positions at about $1.7 million, showing how small the market still is.
The size is relevant for risk. Thin liquidity makes trading harder and can produce abrupt price swings, and with leverage of up to 10x a modest move can liquidate traders quickly. The ANT contract settles in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, which means profits and losses are paid in that token rather than in any Anthropic security.
A 20% decline within the first hour is large by the standards of most markets, but it is less surprising for a brand-new contract with a few million dollars of positions. Early prices in such markets often reflect the first orders placed rather than a broad consensus, and they can move sharply as more participants arrive and as the operator's reference point is tested against real demand.
4. Why a pre-IPO price is hard to define
DeFi researcher Petro Dmytrilev wrote on X that most 24/7 traditional-finance markets on Hyperliquid simply mirror an existing price, while pre-IPO markets create a price where none has ever traded. He described this as possibly the most important product trade.xyz offers. He also noted that an IPO-price perpetual conveys no shares, no allocation, no voting rights and no claim against the issuer, only exposure to price.
Until shares change hands, the only link to Anthropic is trader expectation. With no public price to copy, the operator sets the starting price for each pre-IPO market. That gives the operator unusual influence over how the market begins, a point that distinguishes these contracts from ones that follow an established stock.
The distinction matters for how readers should interpret headlines about the contract. A price of $110 or $138 for ANT is not an official estimate of what Anthropic stock will be worth, and a reading of 1,880 on ANTH is not a valuation that any investor has agreed to pay. These are figures produced by a small group of traders using leverage, shaped by the rules set by the operator.
5. Who holds the risk and the control?
Unlike tokenized stocks, the Anthropic perpetual market is not backed by shares or by a fund that holds them. Each position is funded by the trader's own collateral, and winning bets are paid out of losing bets on the other side. Holders therefore have no claim on Anthropic and depend entirely on the market's rules.
The responsibilities are split. Hyperliquid supplies the infrastructure: trading is non-custodial, users post collateral from their own wallets, and trades settle against prefunded collateral. Trade.xyz sits on top as the market operator. It chooses the price sources, sets leverage limits and open-interest caps, and can halt trading, in which case positions settle at the mark price.
Anthropic has not publicly commented on the contracts. Its help page warns that anyone offering to sell its shares to the public through forward contracts, tokenized securities or other mechanisms is likely selling something worthless. The company has not said whether that warning covers perpetual contracts.
Because winners are paid by losers rather than by an issuer, the arrangement is a closed loop of collateral. If many traders lean in one direction and are wrong, those on the other side collect their collateral; if the operator halts trading, the mark price decides who gains and who loses. Participants are therefore exposed not only to market direction but to the operator's decisions, which is a different kind of risk from owning a share.
6. What happens when Anthropic lists?
Trade.xyz says ANT converts into a standard perpetual that tracks the stock on listing day, typically in the first regular trading session after trading begins. Its own estimate for the listing date is November 20, though Anthropic has not confirmed that. Separately, pricing is reportedly on track for November 19 and 20.
If the listing is delayed, a 60-day grace period runs through January 19, 2027, and ANT can still convert if Anthropic lists inside that window. If the stock has not listed by then, ANT settles in cash at the average price at which it traded since launch. Trade.xyz says it could use a different method if that average would be unfair.
Anthropic and its banks set the IPO price independently of these derivative markets. Investor expectations for the valuation have been put at $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, compared with the $965 billion post-money valuation from the company's private round in May.
The conversion plan is designed to bridge two worlds. Before listing, ANT exists purely as an onchain construct priced by traders. After listing, it is supposed to follow a real stock with a public price, at which point the question of where the starting price came from largely disappears. The date that matters for traders and observers alike is the expected listing around November 20, and the later January 19, 2027 deadline if the offering slips.
7. How accurate have earlier pre-IPO markets been?
In a letter to the SEC, trade.xyz said five completed pre-IPO markets finished within about 0.4% to 7% of each stock's opening price. The SpaceX contract offers a counter-example: it stood at $172.84 the day before trading began, while the IPO priced at $135 and the stock opened at $150. These figures come from trade.xyz and an advocacy group that co-signed the letter, and they have not been independently verified.
The record also includes a warning about fragility. In May, a SpaceX contract on Hyperliquid fell about 45% within 30 minutes and liquidated 405 users, with open interest under $2.9 million. That was a different product, but its setup was similar to the Anthropic contracts.
Taken together, the figures give a mixed picture. Several completed markets finished close to the eventual opening price, which supports the claim that the contracts can approximate market expectations. The SpaceX difference between the pre-listing contract and the opening price, and the sharp May drop that liquidated hundreds of users, show that a thin market can also point the wrong way.
8. What are the regulatory and access limits?
Leverage amplifies every move, and the operator controls the starting price, the pricing rules and the power to halt trading. The CFTC approved the first perpetual on a U.S. exchange in May, and it flagged equity-based perpetuals for joint review with the SEC.
U.S. traders are restricted from trading derivatives on Hyperliquid. Trade.xyz says none of its markets are offered to Americans and that it uses geoblocking and wallet screening. Hyperliquid's terms bar the United States, Ontario and sanctioned territories, but the platform does not verify identity.
Past enforcement has landed on operators. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes pleaded guilty in 2022 to failing to maintain anti-money-laundering checks and received six months of home detention and two years of probation; he was pardoned in 2025. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced in 2024 to four months in prison after prosecutors said the company disguised customers' U.S. locations, and he was later pardoned.
The regulatory backdrop is still developing. A product that references the equity of a company about to go public sits at the boundary between the derivatives rules overseen by the CFTC and the securities rules overseen by the SEC, which is why the joint review of equity-based perpetuals is significant. For now, the contracts remain crypto products that Americans are not supposed to use.