Entropy has opened a HIP-3 perpetual market tied to Anthropic’s pre-IPO valuation, drawing almost $3 million in open interest shortly after launch, according to the platform. The early activity places Entropy in a fast-moving contest among onchain derivatives venues seeking to offer synthetic exposure to private companies shortly before a potential public listing.
The timing gives the market a closer connection to a possible liquidity event than earlier products. Anthropic filed an S-1 registration statement roughly one month before Entropy’s market opened, while Fortune has reported that the artificial-intelligence company is targeting an October IPO. If that schedule holds, traders would be entering the market around six to eight weeks before the offering rather than many months before a public-market reference becomes available.
That compressed window addresses a recurring weakness in pre-IPO perpetual markets: prices can drift sharply when there is little available supply of the underlying private-company shares and no straightforward way to hedge the derivative. A market launched too far ahead of a listing can become dominated by one-sided demand, forcing funding payments — periodic transfers between long and short positions designed to keep perpetual contracts near their reference price — to rise rapidly.
Entropy enters after earlier Anthropic market dislocations
Ventuals launched an Anthropic market in November 2025, before the company had filed for an IPO. That product created synthetic exposure well ahead of a visible public-listing timetable, leaving participants to trade against imperfect secondary-market references and a limited set of potential hedges.
The result was substantial pricing divergence and unstable funding, according to the figures cited in the supplied material. Ventuals’ funding rate at one stage reached 8,700%, an extreme level that would make maintaining a leveraged directional position prohibitively expensive. Such rates are a sign that a perpetual market has struggled to attract enough participants on the opposite side of the prevailing trade.
Private-company contracts face a structural liquidity problem. In a listed stock or a liquid token, market makers can usually buy or sell the underlying asset to offset exposure created in the derivatives book. For an unlisted company, shares may be restricted, thinly traded, expensive to borrow, or unavailable to many market participants. Without reliable arbitrage, a platform’s price can remain disconnected from secondary transactions for extended periods.
Entropy’s Anthropic market has kept funding closer to 10%, based on the figures described in the source material. That level can still impose a meaningful carrying cost depending on the direction and frequency of payments, but it is far removed from the exponential funding pattern reported in the earlier Ventuals market.
The comparison suggests that launch timing is becoming a central competitive variable in onchain markets for private-company exposure. Opening a contract after an S-1 filing can give traders more information about a potential listing, a clearer time horizon, and a more practical basis for judging whether a quoted valuation is plausible. It also shortens the period during which liquidity providers must manage exposure without a public-market hedge.
Liquidity models become the competitive battleground
Entropy is also pursuing direct liquidity provision and distribution partnerships, according to the material. The approach resembles the model associated with Hyperliquid’s HLP, a liquidity pool that supports market depth by taking the other side of trades under a defined risk framework.
That infrastructure mattered during earlier “pre-market” competition in crypto, when platforms raced to list assets before they became widely available elsewhere. Hyperliquid built substantial depth through its HLP structure and Hypercore trading architecture, which was designed for high-throughput order matching. In newer asset classes, outside teams have had to assemble liquidity programs independently rather than relying on the same pool structure.
Trade became the first large-scale HIP-3 deployer after launching equity-linked markets in mid-October 2025, according to the supplied material. It expanded distribution through partner networks and listed several products tied to stocks and indices. Trade said its XYZ100 product, designed to track the Nasdaq 100, surpassed $1 billion in cumulative trading volume by Nov. 6, 2025, while the platform’s broader activity reached billions of dollars in daily volume and open interest.
Ventuals entered some markets before Trade but struggled to preserve share once competing venues introduced deeper products, the material says. Trade later acquired Ventuals’ activity, illustrating how early listing alone may not be enough when traders can move to a venue offering tighter spreads, lower financing costs, or greater available size.
An IPO timetable offers a clearer test
Anthropic’s possible October IPO would give Entropy’s market a near-term test of whether that combination of timing and liquidity support can hold. As the listing approaches, private secondary-market indications, IPO pricing reports, and eventual public trading could provide increasingly useful anchors for the perpetual contract.
The structure remains inherently riskier than a derivative tied to a freely traded stock. An S-1 filing does not guarantee that an IPO will occur on the expected schedule, and the final offering valuation could differ materially from prices implied by private-market transactions or onchain contracts. Market conditions, regulatory review, and company decisions can delay or alter a planned listing.
Anthropic, led by Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, has been among the most closely watched private AI companies. The supplied material cites a May 2026 valuation of $965 billion and says the company planned to present a $30 trillion total-addressable-market estimate to institutional buyers in late August. Those figures would place unusually high stakes on any pre-IPO pricing venue, since relatively small changes in valuation expectations can produce large moves in a leveraged synthetic contract.
For Entropy, the immediate challenge is less about listing the contract first than keeping it tradable through the final approach to a potential IPO. Sustained two-sided liquidity, funding that remains within manageable ranges, and prices that track credible external references would determine whether the product can retain activity once traders have more conventional routes to gain exposure.
For deeper context on funding, volatility, and liquidation risks in these markets, explore our primer here.
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