Pricing OpenAI Pre-IPO: A New, Life-or-Death Business on Hyperliquid Lasting Half a Year
Pricing OpenAI Pre-IPO: Hyperliquid's High-Stakes, Six-Month Business Venture
The article analyzes the nascent market for pre-IPO perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid blockchain, exemplified by two contrasting teams: Trade.xyz and Ventuals.
Trade.xyz, an anonymous team, successfully built the largest pre-market on Hyperliquid. Its strategy focused on near-term events, like the SpaceX IPO. By listing a SpaceX contract with a known launch date and price, the market had a tangible "anchor" (the eventual Nasdaq opening price) to converge upon, which kept speculation in check. This approach fueled significant growth.
In stark contrast, Ventuals, backed by Paradigm, failed despite holding coveted contracts for OpenAI and Anthropic. Its critical flaw was its pricing mechanism for these companies, which have no imminent IPO. Ventuals' oracle price was half-derived from infrequent private market transactions and half from its own contract's moving average. This created a self-reinforcing loop where buying pressure artificially inflated the price, disconnecting it from real supply and demand. The market became illiquid and structurally skewed.
Ventuals shut down nine months after launch, reportedly through an acquisition. Its final settlement prices—OpenAI at ~$1,341 and Anthropic at ~$1,618—were thus partially products of its flawed model. Ironically, some company employees and late-stage VCs reportedly used these prices for valuation reference, highlighting the desperate demand for price discovery in opaque private markets.
The failure of Ventuals exposes the core challenge of this business: price for illiquid, non-public assets requires a robust, self-correcting market, which is absent without a definitive public listing event. Nevertheless, demand is driving major players like Coinbase and traditional finance (e.g., Citi) to enter the space, aiming to provide 24/7 trading for coveted private company shares. The venture's ultimate viability, however, hinges on solving the fundamental pricing problem Ventuals could not.
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