Anthropic has not gone public yet, but that has not stopped traders from placing borrowed-money bets on its eventual IPO. On Hyperliquid, a decentralized crypto exchange whose trades settle on a public blockchain, two contracts already let people take positions tied to the company. Entropy runs ANTH. Trade.xyz runs ANT.
The setup comes with a clear warning from Anthropic. Its help page says anyone claiming to sell its shares to the public through forward contracts, tokenized securities, or other mechanisms is likely offering something worthless. The two Hyperliquid products are perpetual swaps. They do not deliver shares or claim to represent them. Anthropic has not said whether its warning covers perpetual contracts, which are futures agreements that never expire.
Two contracts, no shares
Until Anthropic shares begin trading, the only link between these contracts and the company is trader expectation. There is no public share price to copy. The operator sets the starting price for each pre-IPO market. A DeFi researcher, Petro Dmytrilev, noted on X that such a product conveys no shares, no allocation, no voting rights, and no claim against the issuer. It offers price exposure only.
That distinction matters. Buyers are not getting equity. They are getting a wager on where the market might value Anthropic later. The contracts can still move sharply because they are built for short-term trading, not long-term ownership.
How the pricing works
Perpetual swaps use a funding rate, a small periodic payment between longs and shorts, to keep the contract near its reference price. Longs bet on a rise. Shorts bet on a decline.
Entropy’s ANTH is priced by valuation. Each $1 of price represents $1 billion of company value. A reading near 1,880 would value Anthropic at about $1.9 trillion. ANT references one share of Anthropic Class A stock. Its price follows a 30-minute moving average driven by resting orders on the order book. Trade.xyz uses discovery bounds that hold the price within a band around a reference point. The band can reset only a limited number of times. For pre-IPO markets, the company typically damps the rate to 1% of its standard level.
A rough first session
ANT had a rough debut. Hyperliquid data showed it opening near $138 at 9 a.m. ET before dropping to around $110 by about 11:50 a.m. Volume was $8.7 million, with $2.2 million in open interest. The contract allows up to 10-fold exposure. A 10% move against a position can wipe out its collateral. ANT is cash-settled in the stablecoin USDC.
Tokenized equities are coming with or without issuer support. In issuer-sponsored models, the token is the share itself, which preserves control and full rights. For now, these Anthropic contracts sit in a different category: a market built on expectations before the real shares trade.
