The most anticipated IPOs of the decade have been pricing continuously for months, not on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, but on a decentralized exchange that Wall Street is finally beginning to pay attention to.
Hyperliquid's ascent is no longer a story about perpetuals. It is a story about infrastructure. The platform's HIP-3 framework has quietly expanded the perimeter of what onchain markets can price, from commodities to tokenized stocks, but one segment is flying under the radar: unlisted companies that have consumed more market participants' imagination than any asset class in a generation.
For the past three years, artificial intelligence has drained retail attention into a single trade. Semiconductors became the consensus trade, the shovel in a gold rush where no one could yet buy the mine.
While the instinct is sound, hyperscalers remaining the most relevant proxy for anyone seeking exposure to the artificial intelligence secular trend, onchain participants found a more direct path straight to SpaceX, Anthropic or OpenAI themselves. Any funding round leak, any regulatory filing or any late-night memo from a founder: the market moves before the morning note lands.
Ventuals and continuous pricing
Sitting on top of Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, the same permissionless perpetuals layer that now hosts commodity and forex exposure, Ventuals runs pre-IPO perpetual contracts on the companies institutional allocators spend years trying to access.
What Ventuals offers is price discovery, raw, continuous and crowdsourced, on assets that traditional markets price exactly twice: at the last funding round and at the IPO. Everything in between is rumour dressed as valuation, and Ventuals turned that vacuum into a market.
Private company valuations move when bankers decide they do. Ventuals reprices when news breaks, which is to say, at any hour on any day, with no specialist to call and no open-auction to wait for.
Ventuals' capital flows
The three pre-IPO perpetuals, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, represent 20.3% of cumulative traded volume, with SpaceX alone accounting for roughly half of that share. Ventuals has accumulated $367mn in cumulative trading volume since inception last November, with more than two thirds of that, roughly $250mn, realized over the past month alone.
Chart
(Source: Flowscan, HIP-3 Markets)
The platform's offering spans well beyond pre-IPO names. Market participants can trade diverse indexes across defence, energy and niche segments like robotics. The dominant force in that flow is the MAG7 index, accounting for 43% of volume across the period, while only a 10.5% share is driven by Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI.
By volume, Ventuals looks like a sophisticated index trading venue that happens to offer pre-IPO exposure on the side. But the deck looks completely reshuffled through the lens of open interest. While indices like the MAG7 drive the frantic, short-term turnover that generates volume, the open interest tells the story of high-conviction, long-term positioning.
In this "Architect" phase of the market, volume is the noise of the day traders, but open interest is the signal of the allocators.
Chart
(Source: Flowscan, HIP-3 Markets)
The same trio, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, captures 57% of total open interest. Of the $9.5mn sitting on the platform, $5.4m belongs to those three companies. OpenAI leads at 23.2% while SpaceX follows at 21.2%. The MAG7 index, dominant by volume, holds just 18.6% of open interest.
Whatever the volume ranking suggests, the capital with the longest time horizon and the highest conviction is parked in three pre-IPO companies.
Before the pricing prospectus: the onchain perpetual
SpaceX remains the dominant narrative and the highest-traded prediction market on Polymarket, its gravitational pull strong enough to send listed space stocks surging on hype alone. But the most instructive volume surge on Ventuals over the past month belongs to OpenAI.
The perpetual had been trading around $650bn in implied valuation, already a 117% premium to the previous $300bn from March 2025, when the end-of-February funding round landed. By the time the formal announcement confirmed the latest capital raise, the onchain market had already been pricing the shift for weeks.
(Source: Notice)
The market repriced on announcement day. The contract now trades around $930bn, once again at a premium to the institutional print. The pattern is mechanical at this point: Ventuals leads, the round confirms and the perpetual overshoots.
Anthropic's volume story is built differently. On top of the February funding round, a sequence of enterprise signals each re-rated the revenue base incrementally. Microsoft's integration into Copilot and Allianz's deployment of Claude as its internal artificial intelligence platform landed within the same week. Each new Claude capability pulling enterprise clients away from legacy incumbents sent another tremor through the bellwethers: billions in market cap evaporating from the old guard as the market priced the replacement cycle in real time.
The destination of that repricing happened onchain. Anthropic's perpetual sits at $650bn, a 71% premium to the latest round's $380bn post-money valuation. It is not pricing what Anthropic raised, but pricing where it is going ahead of the next funding round.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is the purest price discovery exercise of the three. There has been no primary round since January 2023. Every move in the perpetual is a direct function of information flow: operational, political and structural. A valuation breach of $1tn was already difficult to internalize, marking the first private company in history to cross that threshold. The contract now trades at $1.63tn.
Chart
(Source: Hyperliquid)
In the second half of February, data confirming SpaceX was outlaunching the rest of the world combined, alongside the successful Starlink 10-34 mission, pushed implied valuation to flirt with $1.9tn.
From below $1tn before the xAI deal, to $1.25tn post-merger, to $1.5tn in secondary market chatter, the Ventuals perpetual was already flirting with $1.9tn by the time SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC in late February at $1.75tn in PitchBook's fair value range.
Ventuals' pre-IPO perpetuals are not a single instrument with a single use case. For the directional trader, they are the only venue offering continuous exposure to the most consequential listings of the decade.
For the institutional participant already holding secondary positions in SpaceX, Anthropic or OpenAI through traditional channels, they are something more structural: a live hedge against valuation compression between now and the IPO date.
When price discovery runs continuously, the instrument becomes whatever the participant needs it to be: expression, hedge or simply the most honest read on what the market actually thinks these companies are worth, unfiltered by quarterly markings and fund administrator lag.
