Is Crypto Overpricing Anthropic?

Anthropic made its IPO filing public on Monday. According to crypto traders, it’s already worth about $1.9 trillion.

That’s the price implied by contracts on seven offshore crypto exchanges, which range from $1.87 trillion to $1.92 trillion. On trade.xyz, a venue on the Hyperliquid blockchain, a contract on Anthropic’s shares opened Monday at $138 and traded near $115 by Tuesday afternoon.

That puts crypto’s price near the top of the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range the IPO is reported to target. Pricing is reportedly expected in mid-November. The filing itself leaves the number of shares and the price range blank.

For most investors, a hot IPO’s first public price is its opening trade. This year, offshore crypto venues have posted a price days or weeks earlier, through perpetually traded contracts that track a private company’s expected share price until it lists. Seven of those contracts, or perps, have now run all the way into a listing: Cerebras, Quantinuum, SpaceX, SK Hynix, CXMT, Unitree and SHEIN. That record is the best available test of what Anthropic’s $1.9 trillion is worth as a forecast. It shows that whenever a contract sat above the IPO price, the stock closed its first day above it too. It also shows they missed the opening trade by about 25% on average, with every venue wrong at once.

These contracts let traders bet on where Anthropic’s share price is headed, with gains and losses paid in cash. Buying one never gets you actual Anthropic stock, though.

On trade.xyz, the ANT contract references one Class A share. Until Anthropic lists, its price comes from trading on the venue itself, inside limits the venue sets. Once the stock trades on Nasdaq, the contract converts into an ordinary perp tied to the listed price. The contracts are settled in stablecoins, and offer 10x leverage before the listing. In an August letter to the SEC, written with the Hyperliquid Policy Center advocacy group, trade.xyz described what a holder gets: “The position is synthetic price exposure and nothing more.”

Other exchanges quote a total valuation, based on an assumed share count. Binance assumes 1 billion shares, meaning a quote of 1,883 equates to a $1.88 trillion market capitalization.

None of these contracts are offered to US residents. Anthropic’s support page also warns that anyone selling its shares through “tokenized securities, or other mechanisms” is “likely offering an investment that may have no value due to our transfer restrictions.”

In the rest of the issue, subscribers get:

• • How close each of the previous seven perps came to the actual IPO price and opening trade, and how they missed
  • Why venues that agree with each other within about 1.3% still got Quantinuum badly wrong after it priced
  • How much SpaceX and Cerebras left on the table, and which traders paid for the misses on listing day
  • What every Anthropic product on offer actually gives you, and the only routes to an ANT share for a US investor
  • Three ranges for Anthropic’s listing day, and the dated signals to watch before it prices

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