Anthropic’s IPO is still weeks away, but crypto traders are not waiting. On Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange that settles trades on a public blockchain, two perpetual contracts let people place leveraged bets on the company’s future value. The products are Entropy’s ANTH and trade.xyz’s ANT. Both are perpetual swaps, so they never expire. Neither delivers Anthropic shares or gives a claim on them. That distinction matters, and it is also where the risk starts.
Anthropic’s warning
Anthropic has not commented directly on these contracts, according to the report. Its help page does warn that anyone claiming to sell its shares to the public through forward contracts, tokenized securities, or similar mechanisms is likely offering something worthless. The page does not clearly address perpetual contracts, and Anthropic has not said whether the warning covers them. For traders, the gap leaves room for interpretation. I think that ambiguity is part of the appeal, though it is not a protection.
How the bets are priced
With no public share price to track, the operator sets the starting level for each pre-IPO market. Entropy’s ANTH is priced by valuation: each $1 in contract price represents $1 billion in company value. A reading near 1,880 would value Anthropic at about $1.9 trillion. ANT is different. It references one share of Anthropic Class A stock and follows a 30-minute moving average based on resting orders on the order book. Trade.xyz uses discovery bounds to keep the price inside a band around a reference point, with limited resets. For pre-IPO markets, the company typically damps the rate to 1% of its standard level.
Perps use a funding rate, a small periodic payment between longs and shorts, to push the contract toward its reference price. Longs bet on gains. Shorts bet on declines. The setup can keep the contract near the operator’s chosen mark, but it cannot create a real public share price before one exists.
A rough first session
ANT’s debut was not smooth. Hyperliquid data showed it opening near $138 at 9 a.m. ET and then dropping to around $110 by about 11:50 a.m. It traded on $8.7 million in volume, with $2.2 million in open interest. The contract allows up to 10-fold leverage. That means a 10% move against a position can wipe out the collateral behind it. ANT is cash-settled in USDC, so no shares change hands.
Tokenized equities are coming with or without issuer support. Issuer-sponsored models make the token the share itself and preserve control and full rights. The Hyperliquid contracts are not that. Until Anthropic shares trade publicly, the only link to the company is trader expectation.
