Hyperliquid Contracts Tied to Anthropic Attract Millions

On Hyperliquid, traders are already trading Anthropic derivatives, even though the IPO is still weeks away. The contracts are highly leveraged perpetuals with no shares behind them, thin liquidity, and fast price swings.

• Hyperliquid
• DeFi
• Regulation
• United States
• AI

Key Takeaways

• Traders are already speculating on Anthropic’s IPO through two Hyperliquid contracts, even though the IPO is still weeks away.
• The ANT contracts are perpetual swaps with no claim on shares and started weak, opening around $138 and falling to about $110.
• The market is risky because of low liquidity, up to 10x leverage, and rules set by the operator.

Traders are already speculating on Anthropic’s IPO, even though the IPO is still weeks away. On Hyperliquid, two contracts are live that let them use borrowed money to bet on the valuation of the AI company, without any shares behind them. The new ANT contracts started weak and show how fast these pre-IPO markets can move.

How the Contracts Work

The contracts on Hyperliquid are called Entropy’s ANTH and trade.xyz’s ANT. They are perpetual swaps, meaning derivatives with no expiration date. They do not give you shares and they also do not give you a claim on shares. Anthropic warns on its help page that anyone claiming to sell its shares to the public through forward contracts, tokenized securities, or other setups is probably offering something worthless.

With this kind of contract, a funding rate keeps the price close to a reference price. Longs sometimes pay shorts, or the other way around. With ANTH, every $1 (€0.90) stands for $1 billion (€0.9 billion) in company value. So a price around 1,880 would value Anthropic at about $1.9 trillion (€1.7 trillion). ANT works differently and follows a 30-day moving average driven by orders in the order book. Trade.xyz also uses so-called discovery bounds, which keep the price within a range.

Weak Start for ANT

The first hours of trading were choppy. Hyperliquid data showed that ANT opened around $138 (€124) and dropped to about $110 (€98), on volume of $8.7 million (€7.8 million) and open interest of $2.2 million (€2 million). The contract allows up to 10x leverage, which means a 10% move against a position can already be enough to wipe out the collateral.

Trade.xyz says ANT will be converted on listing day into a standard perpetual contract that tracks the price of the underlying share, usually in the first regular trading session after the shares start trading. The company is now expecting a listing date of November 20, but that is its own estimate and not a confirmation from Anthropic. If the listing does not happen, a 60-day grace period applies.

Why This Matters

For European crypto followers, this shows how far derivatives on the crypto market have already reached. Hyperliquid is a decentralized crypto exchange where transactions are settled on a public blockchain, but access is still limited: U.S. users are excluded and the frontend is geoblocked for them. That fits into a broader debate about how regulators view crypto-like trading in stocks and derivatives, especially now that the CFTC and SEC are also looking at new frameworks for these kinds of products.

The risks are clear. Liquidity is often thin, leverage magnifies every move, and the operator decides the opening price, the rules, and when trading can be paused. In May, a similar oracle error on a Hyperliquid contract already showed how fast a market like this can turn, with heavy liquidations in a short time. For now, the price of Anthropic remains mostly a game of expectations, not real shares.