pre-IPO · perps · $ANTHROPIC · education
What Is a Pre-IPO Perpetual Future? How People Are Trading Anthropic Before It Goes Public
· 8 min read
In May 2026, Anthropic publicly named firms it said were trading its stock without approval, and warned that any transfer it had not authorized would not be recognized on its books.
A few weeks later, on June 1, it confidentially filed a draft registration statement to go public.
So here is the strange part. Buying a real share of Anthropic is hard, and for most people effectively off the table. And yet on a crypto exchange called Hyperliquid, people are placing live bets that track the company’s valuation, with the contract changing hands at over $1,600.
How? A thing called a pre-IPO perpetual future.
If that phrase means nothing to you, that is fine. By the end of this you will understand it better than most people who throw it around.
The short answer
A pre-IPO perpetual future is a cash-settled bet on a private company’s valuation before it goes public. You never own a share, you get no ownership or voting rights, and nothing physical changes hands. The price you see leans heavily on how badly people want exposure, which is why it can sit far from the company’s last private valuation.
What we’ll cover
- The Anthropic setup that makes this possible
- What a pre-IPO perpetual future actually is
- Why the price can sit well above the last private round
- Why a thin market makes that number fragile
- What open interest, volume, and funding are really telling you
First, the strange situation
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, confidentially filed for its IPO on June 1, 2026. The filing followed a roughly $65 billion funding round that valued the company at about $965 billion.
Here is the catch. In May, Anthropic put out a notice naming secondary marketplaces, reportedly including Forge, Hiive, and Sydecar, and said that share transfers it had not approved would not be recognized on its books, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Some of those firms pushed back on how their role was described.
So you have one of the most wanted companies on earth, about to go public, and the front door to buying it is mostly closed.
When demand has nowhere to go, it finds a side door. That side door is the perpetual future.
| Claim | Source | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic confidentially filed a draft IPO registration on June 1, 2026 | AP | Demand to own it is about to spike |
| Anthropic warned that unapproved transfers of its shares would not be recognized | WSJ | The real shares are hard to get |
| Pre-IPO perps are cash-settled and convey no ownership of shares | Coinbase | What you are actually holding is a cash bet |
Can you buy Anthropic stock before it goes public?
For almost everyone, not really. The shares are private, tightly held, and Anthropic has made clear it will not recognize transfers it did not approve.
That is the gap the perpetual future steps into. It does not get you a share. It gets you a number that moves with the story.
What a pre-IPO perpetual future actually is
Let me use a picture. Imagine your neighbor owns a house that is clearly going to be worth a fortune, but it is not for sale and never will be.
You and a friend still want to bet on what it is worth. So you make a deal: every day you check an agreed estimate of the house’s value, and whoever guessed the wrong direction pays the other the difference in cash.
You never own a single brick. No keys change hands. You are just settling up in cash based on a number you both agreed to track.
That is a pre-IPO perpetual future.
In the real version, the “house” is a private company like Anthropic or SpaceX. The contract is settled in cash, it tracks the company’s total equity valuation, and it has no expiry date, which is the “perpetual” part. If you want the full mechanics of how perps work, I wrote a beginner guide to perpetual futures that breaks down leverage, funding, and liquidation.
Buying real pre-IPO stock
You own an actual claim on the company. It is hard to get, often restricted, and in Anthropic’s case, subject to explicit transfer restrictions.
A pre-IPO perp
You own nothing. You hold a cash bet on the valuation that anyone can open or close in seconds.
Why the price can look insane
This is the part most people get wrong, so read it twice.
The perp price is not the company’s valuation. It is closer to the price of wanting in.
With a normal stock, price is anchored by a real supply of shares you can buy and sell. With a pre-IPO perp, there is no such pool of shares to anchor it, so the price leans much more heavily on how many people want to be long versus short, and how much leverage they bring.
You can watch this happen. When SpaceX pre-IPO perps went live on Hyperliquid, traders pushed the implied valuation above $2.5 trillion, well beyond the company’s own reported target. For Anthropic, the Talis desk has watched the contract trade at more than double the private secondary-market reference prices.
(Desk observation on the Anthropic contract on Hyperliquid, around June 15, 2026. These markets move fast, so treat any single number as a photograph, not a fixed fact.)
A double or triple premium does not mean the crowd thinks Anthropic is worth two or three times its last private round. It means a lot of demand is squeezing through a very small door.
Why that number is fragile
Here is where it gets genuinely useful, and where I want to save you from a mistake even seasoned people make.
A price tag only means something if there is a real market behind it. Picture a single shirt in an empty store with a $1,000 tag on it. Is the shirt worth $1,000? Only if someone actually shows up to pay it.
Around mid-June, the Anthropic contract looked a lot like that empty store: an order book with almost nothing resting in it, open interest near zero, and only about $124,000 of trading over a full day. For a company last valued near $965 billion, that is a whisper.
Two numbers explain why that matters, and the difference between them is where most people slip:
| Number | What people think it means | What it actually means |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | How many people are in | How much changed hands, even from a few repeat trades |
| Open interest | Direction of the crowd | How many positions are still actually open right now |
| Funding rate | Whether the price goes up | Which side is more crowded, and what it costs to stay |
When open interest is near zero, almost nobody is holding a real position. The price on the screen can be moved by a single modest order. That is not a conspiracy, it is just thin liquidity, and it is the difference between a number discovered by a crowd and a number set by the last person who clicked.
Funding tells a similar story. When funding sits near zero, neither side is paying to hold, which means there is no crowded bet to read into. A flat funding rate is not bullish or bearish. It is the market shrugging.
So are these markets useless?
No, and this is the fair counterpoint.
When there is real participation, pre-IPO perps can be a genuinely useful read on demand, which is why they are increasingly watched as an onchain price-discovery signal for companies the public market cannot price yet.
The lesson is not “ignore these markets.” It is read them for what they are: a live gauge of demand that is sharp when the crowd is real and close to meaningless when the store is empty. The skill is telling the two apart.
The one thing to remember
A pre-IPO perp price answers a different question than the one most people think it does.
It does not tell you what Anthropic is worth. It tells you how much people are willing to pay, right now, to get exposure to something they otherwise cannot touch.
Those are two very different numbers. Knowing which one you are looking at is most of the game.
Quick questions
- What is a pre-IPO perpetual future?A pre-IPO perpetual future is a cash-settled derivative that lets you take a position on a private company's expected valuation before it goes public. It is settled in cash (usually a stablecoin like USDC), references the company's total equity value rather than a real share, and never expires. You do not own any stock, you have no shareholder rights, and no shares change hands.
- Can you buy Anthropic stock before its IPO?For most people, not easily. Anthropic's shares are private, and in May 2026 the company publicly named firms it said were trading its stock without approval and warned that transfers it had not authorized would not be recognized on its books. Pre-IPO perpetual futures are a separate, synthetic way to get price exposure, but they are a cash bet on the valuation, not real ownership of the company.
- Does a pre-IPO perp mean I own a piece of the company?No. You own nothing. A pre-IPO perp is a contract that settles in cash based on a reference price. It conveys no equity, no voting rights, and no claim on the company's shares.
- Why can the Anthropic perp price sit far above its last private valuation?Because the perp price leans heavily on trader demand and leverage rather than a supply of real shares. When almost no one can buy the actual stock, that demand pools into the synthetic market and can push the implied valuation well above private secondary-market reference prices. The premium reflects how much people want exposure, not a verdict on what the company is worth.
- What does open interest tell you that volume does not?Volume is how much changed hands; open interest is how many positions are actually still open. A market can show volume from a handful of repeat trades while open interest sits near zero, meaning almost no one is holding a real position. Near-zero open interest is a sign the price is fragile and easy to move.
This article is for education only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Pre-IPO perpetual futures are high-risk instruments: they convey no ownership, prices can detach sharply from any private valuation, and leverage can erase your deposit quickly. Figures described from the Talis desk are point-in-time observations and will have changed. Availability of these products varies by jurisdiction.