Traders bet on a pop for Anthropic's historic IPO

News of Anthropic’s historic initial public offering provided a wave of relief for tech investors. The response in the perpetual futures market might provide even more relief.

As Anthropic prepares to raise money in its initial public offering this month, traders in offshore markets are making large bets that there will be a big pop on the AI giant’s debut.

Trying to guess an initial first day IPO reaction is nearly impossible, but a new and fast-growing corner of the markets might offer some clues.

Pre-IPO perpetuals, contracts that aim to track the price of private companies, trade on decentralized crypto exchanges like Hyperliquid, Coinbase, Binance and OKX to name a few. The current Hyperliquid Anthropic contract implies a stock price of $98 and its market cap at roughly $1.7 trillion, more than 30% higher than the $70-$78 range announced in the company’s updated S1.

While trading on the exchange is not currently available to American investors, about $250 million of volume traded across Hyperliquid’s two Anthropic trackers in the past 24 hours, according to the exchange.

Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO Anthropic perp began trading two weeks ago at $138 before settling into a roughly ten-dollar range between $110 and $120 prior to last week’s selloff in tech stocks, as the contract slipped below $94 at one point.

To proponents of this new asset class, the pricing of the perps is evidence that bankers intentionally undersell equity ahead of IPOs to ensure a post-market “pop.” Looking at SpaceX, the argument rings true: pre-IPO perps on SpaceX traded at a premium and converged with equity prices at the IPO, all before shares went on a three-day rally of as much as 40% in the immediate aftermath of the listing.

News of Anthropic’s upcoming roadshow may be weighing on competitor OpenAI. Perps tracking OpenAI’s market cap dropped 7% to $1.27 trillion, according to Hyperliquid trading on a contract trading $2.8 billion in volume over the past 24 hours.

Shares of Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), the publicly-traded Treasury company investing in the HYPE tokens that power the exchange fell 4% Tuesday. The stock is up 150% on the year.