Traders are already placing leveraged bets on Anthropic’s IPO using crypto contracts

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.

ANTH price on Hyperliquid

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. ET before 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.

ANT/USD (Hyperliquid)

ANT is cash-settled in the stablecoin USDC.

Unlike tokenized stocks, the Anthropic perp market is not backed by shares or by a fund that holds them. The money behind each position is the trader’s collateral, and each winning bet is paid by a losing one on the other side.

Hyperliquid runs the plumbing. Trading is non-custodial, with users posting collateral from their own wallets, and trades execute, clear and settle against prefunded collateral. The market operator sits on top and holders rely on its rules.

Trade.xyz chooses the price sources, sets leverage limits and open-interest caps, and can halt trading, with positions then settling at the mark price.

How it connects to the IPO

On listing day, trade.xyz says ANT converts into a standard perpetual contract that tracks the price of the underlying stock, typically in the first regular session after the shares start trading. Trade.xyz has set Nov. 20 as the expected listing date, but that is its own estimate, not one Anthropic has confirmed.

If the listing is delayed, the contract has a 60-day grace period, through Jan. 19, 2027, and can still convert if Anthropic lists within it. If the stock hasn’t listed by then, ANT settles in cash at the average price the contract traded at since it launched, although trade.xyz says it can use a different method if that average wouldn’t be fair.

The IPO price is set by Anthropic and its banks independently of these derivative markets.

The Financial Times said investors expect a $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion valuation, and Fox Business’s Liz Claman said pricing remains on track for Nov. 19-20. The contracts will be one more signal alongside that. Anthropic’s last private round, in May, valued it at $965 billion post-money.

Trade.xyz says its earlier pre-IPO contracts tracked well. In a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it said five completed markets finished within about 0.4% to 7% of each stock’s opening price.

For SpaceX, the contract sat at $172.84 the day before trading began, the IPO priced at $135 and the stock opened at $150. Those figures come from trade.xyz and an advocacy group that co-signed the letter, and they haven’t been independently verified.

The risks

The main risk for pre-IPO enthusiasts is thin liquidity, which makes it harder to trade and can lead to volatile pricing. In May, a SpaceX contract on Hyperliquid fell about 45% in a 30-minute window and liquidated 405 users. Open interest was under $2.9 million at the time. That was a different product, but the setup was similar.

Leverage amplifies every move, and the operator holds the starting price, the pricing rules and the power to halt. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) approved the first perpetual on a U.S. exchange in May and 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 U.S., Ontario and sanctioned territories, but the platform doesn’t verify identity.

Enforcement against similar platforms has landed on operators. In 2022, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes pleaded guilty to failing to maintain anti-money-laundering checks. He was sentenced to six months of home detention and two years of probation, and pardoned in 2025. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison in 2024, and prosecutors said the company disguised customers’ locations in the U.S. He, too, was subsequently pardoned.