The Zhitong Finance App noticed that the news of Anthropic's historic initial public offering brought a wave of relief to technology stock investors. And the perpetual futures market's reaction may bring more relief.
As Anthropic prepares to raise capital through an IPO this month, offshore market traders are betting big on the AI giant's first day of listing for a big “jump”.
Trying to predict the reaction on the first day of an IPO is almost impossible, but a new and rapidly growing corner of the market may provide some clues.
Pre-IPO perpetual contracts — these types of contracts designed to track the prices of private companies are traded on decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges such as Hyperliquid, Coinbase, Binance (Binance), and OKX. The current implied share price of Hyperliquid's Anthropic contract is $98, with an implied market value of about $1.7 trillion, which is more than 30% higher than the $70 to $78 issuance range announced in the company's updated S1 document.
Although trading on the exchange is currently closed to US investors, according to the exchange's data, the two contracts tracking Anthropic on Hyperliquid have totaled around US$250 million in the past 24 hours.
Hyperliquid's Anthropic pre-IPO perpetual contract began trading at $138 two weeks ago, then stabilized in the range of about 10 dollars between 110 and 120 dollars before the sell-off of technology stocks last week. The contract price once fell below $94.
According to supporters of this new asset class, the pricing of perpetual contracts is proof that bankers intend to lower stock pricing before the IPO to ensure a “jump” after listing. Taking SpaceX as an example, this argument seems to hold: SpaceX's pre-IPO perpetual contract was traded at a premium and converged with the stock price at the time of the IPO, then immediately after listing, the stock experienced a three-day cumulative increase of up to 40%.
The news that Anthropic is about to launch a roadshow may be putting pressure on rival OpenAI. According to Hyperliquid transaction data, perpetual contracts that track OpenAI's market value fell 7% to $1.27 trillion, with a turnover of 2.8 billion US dollars in the past 24 hours.
Shares of the publicly listed treasury bond company Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR.US) fell 4% on Tuesday. The company invests in HYPE tokens that power the exchange. The stock is up 150% cumulatively this year.