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1. Anthropic IPO puts crypto liquidity back in focus
Anthropic plans to price its initial public offering on November 18, 2026, and begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT on November 19, with shares offered at $70 to $78. The Anthropic IPO, which could raise about $64.4 billion at the top of the range, has revived a debate among crypto traders over whether giant listings pull money away from Bitcoin.
The question matters because Bitcoin (BTC) has spent recent weeks under pressure. The largest cryptocurrency was trading near $74,000 on November 11 after rebounding from a selloff the previous day, and it has fallen about 15% from its high in early October.
One reading of recent history argues that the pressure from a mega-IPO tends to arrive before the listing rather than after it. If that pattern repeats, the analysis goes, much of the damage to crypto prices may already be behind the market. What follows is an analytical view of that thesis, not a forecast that markets are bound to follow. The aim is to set out the reasoning, the evidence behind it and its limits.
2. What is the Anthropic IPO price and valuation?
Anthropic has set a price range of $70 to $78 per share for roughly 825 million Class A shares. At the top of that range, the sale would raise about $64.4 billion, making it one of the largest stock offerings on record.
At those prices, the artificial intelligence company would be valued at between $916 billion and $1.02 trillion based on its basic share count. On a fully diluted basis, which counts options, convertible instruments and other potential shares, the valuation could reach as much as $1.405 trillion.
That is well below the figure discussed only a few months ago. In September, talk of a target close to $2 trillion circulated, and expectations among major investors have since moved toward roughly $1 trillion following a broad selloff in AI stocks. The shift amounts to a markdown of about 30% in two months. The order book has been described as covered, though not oversubscribed.
Traders on Hyperliquid, the decentralized derivatives exchange, are taking a more optimistic view. Perpetual futures tied to ANT on the platform imply a valuation of about $1.8 trillion, with around $100 million in daily trading volume and $200 million in open interest, suggesting crypto-native speculators are more bullish on the listing than traditional institutions.
Perpetual futures are derivative contracts with no expiry date that let traders bet on an asset's price with leverage. Contracts referencing a company that has not yet listed are purely speculative instruments, and their implied valuation reflects the positioning of crypto traders rather than any formal price set by underwriters.
3. A large retail slice and a $26 billion side deal
About 20% of the offering is set aside for retail investors, roughly twice the share usually allocated to individual buyers in a deal of this size. That detail sits at the heart of the crypto question, because retail traders are also the group most active in Bitcoin and other speculative digital assets.
Alongside the public sale, Anthropic has arranged a $26 billion private placement of non-voting Class N shares at the IPO price. The buyers are seven of the company's compute suppliers: Google and Nvidia are taking about $10 billion each, AMD $2.5 billion, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft about $1 billion apiece, and TSMC $500 million. These shares are not subject to a lock-up period.
A lock-up normally bars existing holders and insiders from selling their shares for a set period after a listing, often several months, to prevent a wave of supply from hitting the market early. The absence of one for the Class N shares means the suppliers are free to sell, although the shares carry no voting rights.
Most of the money raised is intended to pay for computing capacity, the specialized chips and data center infrastructure needed to train and run large AI models.
4. The numbers behind Anthropic's business
Figures disclosed ahead of the offering show rapid growth. Revenue for the first nine months of the year reached $33.2 billion, compared with $2.5 billion in the same period a year earlier.
The company reported an operating loss of $1.26 billion over that period. Its net loss was far larger, at $104 billion, driven mostly by a non-cash charge related to convertible notes rather than by cash spent running the business.
Anthropic has also committed to $900.9 billion in future spending, of which $70.7 billion falls due within the next 12 months. Those commitments underline why the company is raising such large sums and why most of the proceeds are earmarked for compute.
5. Why would a stock IPO affect Bitcoin?
The argument is that mega-IPOs compete with crypto for the same pool of speculative retail money. A dollar used to buy shares in a hotly anticipated listing is a dollar that is not being spent on Bitcoin, Ether or memecoins.
This idea has circulated in crypto markets since April 2026, when the case was first laid out in detail. The mechanism runs mainly through retail allocations: as individuals free up cash to secure IPO shares, some of that money comes from selling or not buying digital assets.
Institutional flows play a smaller role in this framing. The $26 billion private placement, for instance, does not draw on public market liquidity at all, because the chipmakers and cloud providers buying those shares are effectively being repaid through their compute contracts with Anthropic.
6. What happened to Bitcoin around the SpaceX listing
The closest precedent is SpaceX, which listed on June 12, 2026, under the ticker SPCX at a valuation of more than $2 trillion. In the run-up to that listing, Bitcoin fell 29%.
Bitcoin's low came on June 30 at $58,500, a little more than two weeks after SpaceX began trading. From there, the price climbed 37%.
Looking back, the turning point arguably came even earlier. Bitcoin traded near $59,000 on June 5, a week before the SpaceX debut, and the later low was only marginally below that level. On that interpretation, the selling pressure linked to the listing was largely exhausted before the shares even began trading, and the rebound followed soon after.
7. Has the outflow already happened this time?
The relevant question, under this analysis, is not whether the Anthropic IPO will draw money from crypto, but whether that drain has already taken place. Bitcoin's roughly 15% decline from its early October high suggests a good deal of selling has already occurred.
That decline has had several drivers beyond the coming IPO. The market absorbed a $6.3 billion exchange hack, a selloff in stocks tied to AI capital spending and a Democratic sweep in the US elections, each of which weighed on risk appetite.
The scale of the Anthropic deal also differs from SpaceX. The retail portion of the Anthropic offering is about $12.9 billion, compared with roughly $22 billion for SpaceX, or about 59% of the earlier listing's retail draw. A smaller retail slice implies a smaller potential pull on speculative money.
8. Where could Bitcoin bottom?
If the SpaceX pattern were to repeat at about 60% of its scale, the analysis suggests Bitcoin could fall roughly another 5% into the Anthropic listing. That would bring the price close to its 200-week moving average, a long-term trend line that many traders watch as a support level during deep corrections.
The 200-week moving average smooths out roughly four years of weekly prices, a span that covers a full Bitcoin halving cycle. Because it moves slowly, the line is often treated as a gauge of long-term value, and past bear markets have tended to find a floor somewhere near it.
Under that scenario, a bottom could arrive within a day or two. This is a projection built on a single precedent, not a certainty: markets rarely repeat past episodes exactly, and the forces that shaped the June decline were not identical to those at work now.
Still, the comparison offers a framework for thinking about the days ahead. If the IPO-driven drain on crypto mostly happens before a listing, then the period immediately before November 19 would be the point of greatest pressure, and any further weakness could prove short-lived.
9. The wider market backdrop
Major cryptocurrencies were in the red on November 11 but recovering. Bitcoin traded near $74,000, Ether (ETH) near $2,055 and Solana (SOL) near $84. Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded about $95 million in net outflows on November 10.
Outside crypto, stock futures were rising after CoreWeave reported better-than-expected results, while Nvidia shares had dropped 18.4% in November to $166.95 amid pressure on chief executive Jensen Huang. Oil traded near $87 a barrel and gold near $4,050 an ounce.
That mix of a fragile AI trade, cautious ETF flows and a record-setting IPO on the calendar helps explain why traders are paying such close attention to how Anthropic's debut might ripple through digital asset markets.
10. What comes next
Anthropic is expected to set its final share price on November 18, with trading on Nasdaq scheduled to begin on November 19 under the ticker ANT. The final price, and how the shares trade in their first sessions, will show whether institutional caution or the more optimistic signal from Hyperliquid's perpetual futures market proves closer to the mark.
For crypto traders, the coming days will test whether the SpaceX pattern holds. If it does, much of Bitcoin's pain may already be in the past. If it does not, the debate over how mega-IPOs interact with digital asset markets is likely to continue well beyond Anthropic's debut.