Morning Minute: What Anthropic’s $1.4 Trillion IPO Means for Crypto

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors rebound after Tuesday selloff; BTC at $74k
• Anthropic shares plans to IPO on Nov 19th at $1T mc
• Consortium of big banks commit $270M to build stablecoin competitor
• Grayscale pledges $1M to Zcash nonprofits, including WSJ front page ad
• CFTC warns Kalshi over potential enforcement charges tied to new contracts

💵 What Anthropic’s $1.4 Trillion IPO Means for Crypto

Several key new details for Anthropic’s pending IPO were released on Tuesday. The IPO price range was set at $70 to $78 a share, selling 825 million Class A shares to raise about $64.4 billion (at the top of the range). Pricing is expected November 18, with trading starting November 19 on Nasdaq under ANT. Roughly 20% of the deal is set aside for retail, which is about double what a book this size usually gives individual investors.

At the range, Anthropic is worth $916 billion to $1.02 trillion on basic shares, or up to $1.405 trillion fully diluted. In September the company was reportedly eyeing $2 trillion. The Wall Street Journal says major investors now see it landing closer to $1 trillion after last week’s AI selloff. That’s a 30% markdown in two months, and the order book is only reported as covered, not oversubscribed.

Notably on Hyperliquid, ANT is trading at $1.8T with $100M in daily trading volume and $200M in open interest (a big enough market to provide some signal). So perhaps traders are a bit more bullish on ANT price action than Wall Street.

Alongside the IPO sits a $26 billion private placement of non-voting Class N stock, bought at the IPO price by seven of Anthropic’s own compute suppliers. Google and Nvidia take about $10 billion each, AMD $2.5 billion, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft about $1 billion apiece, TSMC $500 million. Those shares carry no lock-up. Combined with the IPO, Anthropic walks away with roughly $84.6 billion for general corporate purposes, mostly compute.

Regarding financials, Anthropic just reported revenue of $33.2 billion through nine months against $2.5 billion a year earlier and a $1.26 billion operating loss. It reported a $104 billion net loss, almost all of it a non-cash charge on convertible notes. And $900.9 billion in committed spending, with $70.7 billion due inside twelve months.

So what does it mean for crypto?

The liquidity drain thesis has been circulating since April, when CoinDesk laid out the case that mega-IPOs pull speculative money from the same pool that funds crypto. Retail allocations are the mechanism. A dollar earmarked for an IPO ticket is a dollar not in Bitcoin or memecoins.

We already ran this experiment. SpaceX listed June 12 at more than $2 trillion. Bitcoin fell 29% going into it, bottomed at $58,500 on June 30, and then rose 37% off that low. But notably, the Bitcoin bottom was effectively in on June 5 at $59k, a full week ahead of the SPCX IPO.

So the question is not whether an IPO pulls money out. It’s whether that already happened. Bitcoin fell roughly 15% from its early-October high through a $6.3 billion exchange hack, an AI capex selloff and a Democratic sweep.

Two things make this deal smaller than it looks for crypto. The retail slice is roughly $12.9 billion against SpaceX’s $22 billion, about 59% as much. And the $26 billion private placement never touches public market liquidity at all, because it comes from Anthropic’s vendors, who then get paid back in compute contracts.

Thus, if the SpaceX pattern repeats, and with the ~60% factor, we could expect BTC to drop another 5% or so into the Anthropic IPO (notably, that’s right where the 200-week moving average is). And we would expect the effective bottom to be in sometime in the next 1-2 days.

The good news is, the pain is mostly behind us, in that scenario. We will find out soon enough if IPO history repeats itself for crypto…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red but rebounding after a brutal selloff yesterday; BTC even at $74k; ETH -2% at $2,055; SOL -1% at $84; HYPE -2% at $73; ZEC -14% at $986
• Gram (+12%), SPX (+6%), and LIT (+5%) led top alt movers
• Oil +2% at $87; Gold -1% at $4,050
• Stock futures are very green after a big Coreweave beat eases AI concerns; DOW +0.14%, Nasdaq +1.9%
• A consortium of 21 banks including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Santander and Deutsche Bank committed about $270 million to fund five years of operations for a US-incorporated dollar stablecoin issuer, known internally as Project Faro
• Nvidia erased its 2026 gains as Spygate fallout continued, falling to $166.95 and down 18.4% in November, as House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast threatened to subpoena CEO Jensen Huang over his dealings with a former executive at a Singapore chip buyer
• Near AI disclosed a breach in which an attacker exploited a remote code execution flaw in the open-source SGLang inference engine to move through its infrastructure, exposing names and emails for about 100 users and chat histories from 18 AI agents
• Trump Media posted a $409.7 million third-quarter profit after a $238 million loss in Q2, on $496.1 million of unrealized gains on digital assets and securities as Bitcoin rose 42% during the quarter
• Grayscale pledged $1 million to Zcash ecosystem nonprofits, funded by reinvesting sponsor fees from its Zcash ETF for up to the fund’s first year, with $100,000 already sent to each of four organizations (along with a full page ad in the WSJ)
• Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz said he has cut his crypto holdings from roughly 26 million XRP to 3 million, from 1,500 BTC to one, and from 40,000 ETH to six, describing years of sales under a longstanding agreement with his wife to sell into new highs
• The CFTC warned Kalshi it may bring enforcement charges over how it notified the agency about new contracts, with Politico reporting dozens of products under review while Kalshi calls it a “procedural error” affecting a handful

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $95M in net outflows on Tuesday; the ETH ETFs saw $1.3M in outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mostly green; DOGE -2%, SHIB even, PEPE -5%, PENGU +1%, TRUMP -2%, SPX +5%, BONK +1%
• Robinhood chain leaders were red; Pons -1% to $102M; Cashcat -9% at $60M; Orbio -4% at $28M; AI -2% at $28M; MEME +17% and v4 +90% led top movers
• Solana top movers included Mihao +17x, Nihao +175x and Hold +25x; Stonk +2% at $50M, Ansem +13% at $55M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Hyperliquid led onchain protocols in revenue on the day with $2.53M, followed by Pump.fun at $1.16M and Papertrade at $1.01M
• Jupiter launched four products extending it beyond trading, including Baskets for one-click token bundles that rebalance automatically and Vaults for curator-managed yield strategies
• Moody’s Ratings and Chainlink completed a pilot distributing credit ratings across multiple blockchains using Chainlink’s cross-chain protocol and Moody’s Token Integration Engine
• *Decrypt* added confidential transfers to its Money Account through Solana infrastructure firm Helius, using zero-knowledge proofs to hide transfer amounts from the public ledger while leaving viewing keys available for compliance

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 30.4 ETH, BAYC -1% at 5.75 ETH, Pudgy -3% at 2.14 ETH
• Gimboz (+35%) and Gs on Ape (+32%) led top movers