With $4.7 trillion in monthly volume, perpetual futures are the biggest and most active overseas crypto market. After nearly hitting the mark on SpaceX’s IPO price, traders are now weighing in on the Anthropic IPO.
Anthropic has yet to set the number of shares and price range for its heavily anticipated initial public offering, but overseas crypto traders are already pricing the artificial intelligence company at nearly $1.9 trillion.
Hours after Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, perpetual futures tied to the developer of Claude AI models were trading around $1,880 on crypto exchanges including Binance and Hyperliquid. Based on an assumed one billion shares used to price the contracts, that implies a valuation of $1.88 trillion, just shy of the $2 trillion upper-end estimate floated by bankers and investors in recent weeks, and higher than the record $1.77 trillion valuation set by SpaceX’s June IPO offering price.
Pre-IPO perpetuals, or perps for short, are a relatively new twist on crypto’s most popular derivatives, which have traditionally allowed traders to speculate on bitcoin and other digital currencies with borrowed money, sometimes with leverage as high as 100 to one. Unlike traditional futures, the contracts have no expiration date and can be traded 24/7. The crypto perpetuals market has boomed recently, and the average monthly trading volume, according to CoinGecko Research, is estimated to be around $4.7 trillion.
So far, pre-IPO perpetual futures have largely remained off limits to U.S. traders. But that could soon change. On Monday, Payward, the parent company of San Francisco-based crypto exchange Kraken, said it plans to use Hyperliquid’s blockchain infrastructure to offer perpetual futures to American customers, subject to regulatory approval.
Crypto enthusiasts argue that perps are becoming an increasingly important engine of price discovery. For example, before SpaceX’s June IPO, Wall Street bankers set the offering price at $135 a share. Crypto traders were betting on a price of roughly $173 the day before SpaceX’s listing. The crypto perp bets fell to about $158 just before the start of the first trading session, which opened at $150 and closed at $160.95, nearly 19% above the price set by the banks. The crypto market had overshot the opening price but correctly anticipated that public investors would pay considerably more.
The value of outstanding Anthropic contracts across more than a dozen crypto exchanges is $134 million, according to data provider DeFiLlama.
The company’s financial disclosures offer plenty for investors to consider. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue, up from just $1.2 billion a year earlier, but reported a staggering $80.7 billion net loss. Most of that loss stemmed from noncash accounting adjustments tied to convertible debt, which became more expensive on paper as Anthropic’s valuation climbed. The company has also committed to spending more than $500 billion dollars on computing power and infrastructure, including multiyear agreements with Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, many of which cannot be canceled.
Anthropic’s prospectus also warns of the substantial risks involved in developing increasingly powerful artificial intelligence. 94 pages, roughly a third of the filing, were devoted to potential hazards ranging from familiar concerns about competition and profitability to the possibility that advanced AI systems could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
The company warned that AI models, including its own, have attempted to resist shutdown, concealed or manipulated information and demonstrated coercive behavior, including “behavior resembling blackmail.” In one particularly disturbing incident during cybersecurity testing, an early version of an Anthropic model discovered a password, used it to gain administrator access to a real third-party computer system, collected additional credentials, changed system settings and accessed an individual’s personal information. Anthropic said the affected parties were notified.
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