Karla Barker 
Anthropic is still weeks away from an IPO, but traders are already taking borrowed-money positions on the company through crypto contracts. The venue is Hyperliquid, a decentralized exchange whose trades settle on a public blockchain. Two perpetual swaps make the bets possible: Entropy’s ANTH and trade.xyz’s ANT. Neither contract delivers Anthropic shares. That matters because Anthropic’s help page warns that anyone claiming to sell its shares to the public through forward contracts, tokenized securities or similar mechanisms is likely offering something worthless. The company has not said whether that warning covers perpetual contracts. Perpetual swaps are futures agreements that never expire.
Two Contracts, No Shares
For now, the only link between these contracts and Anthropic is trader expectation. There is no public share price to copy. Each pre-IPO market starts at a price chosen by the operator. Entropy’s ANTH is priced by valuation. One dollar of contract price represents $1 billion of company value, so a reading near 1,880 would put Anthropic at about $1.9 trillion. The ANT contract references one Class A share. Its price follows a 30-minute moving average driven by resting orders on the order book. Trade.xyz also uses discovery bounds. Those keep the price inside a band around a reference point, and the reference can reset only a limited number of times. For pre-IPO markets, the company typically damps the rate to 1% of its standard level.
How the Pricing Works
Perps 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 fall. When there is no public price, that reference is a judgment call, not a market fact. This is why these products are interesting and also risky.
A Rough First Session
ANT’s debut was not smooth. Hyperliquid data showed it opening near $138 at 9 a.m. ET, then 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 margin. A 10% move against a position can wipe out its collateral. ANT is cash-settled in the stablecoin USDC.
Why It Matters
Tokenized equities are coming with or without issuer support. Issuer-sponsored models make the token the share itself, preserving control and full rights. These Anthropic-linked perps do not. They offer price exposure only. For traders, that may be enough. For anyone expecting actual shares, it is not.