Author: Curry, TechFlow Shenchao
During SpaceX's listing days, the pre-IPO price of SPCX on Hyperliquid flooded social feeds, but few took a closer look at who was deploying this market behind the scenes.
Actually, it's a team called Trade.xyz. Anonymous, emerging only this year, and now it alone accounts for over 90% of the open interest in pre-IPO contracts on Hyperliquid. The hype around SpaceX's on-chain Pre-IPO was largely driven by this single entity.
And just three days after SpaceX's bell ringing, on June 15th, another team in the same business announced it was shutting down.
This one was called Ventuals, backed by Paradigm, and it also offered SpaceX pre-IPO contracts, plus ones for OpenAI and Anthropic. It launched earlier this year and lasted only nine months from start to finish.
The same chain, the same HIP-3 play, the same track. One made SpaceX the largest market on the platform, while the other held OpenAI and Anthropic in its hands, only to end up failing.
What's noteworthy is the way Ventuals exited. According to its official social media posts, it wasn't a case of running away after losing too much; the announcement stated it was acquired, with the team integrated into another project within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. User principal was returned 1:1, marking a respectable exit.
The paradox lies right here. Holding the two most coveted brands, OpenAI and Anthropic, it should have been the last one to fail. What went wrong?
Trade XYZ vs. Ventuals
The successful one, Trade.xyz, remains anonymous to this day.
The project founder only gave a glimpse of his background in an interview with Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan, saying he bought his first Bitcoin for $66 in 2013, had been an investor since, never built a project before, and would have left the crypto space long ago if not for meeting Jeff.
It was this relative newcomer who built the largest pre-IPO market on Hyperliquid. According to Colossus, Trade.xyz has grown 38% weekly since last October, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $130 billion.
It started with silver, then crude oil, then the S&P 500, and finally SpaceX.
Its choice of SpaceX was shrewd.
SpaceX was set to ring the bell on Nasdaq on June 12th, with its IPO price and listing date already fixed. By listing pre-IPO contracts, Trade.xyz was essentially betting on an event with a certain outcome; the Nasdaq would provide a real price on listing day. This real price acted like an anchor, preventing the pre-IPO price from straying too far. Even if the quote deviated in between, it would snap back at the moment of listing.
This is exactly what happened. SPCX traded between $154 and $172 in the days before listing, betting on a premium above the $135 IPO price, and indeed surged on debut, proving the bet correct.
Ventuals chose a different type of asset.
Backed by Paradigm, one of crypto's top-tier VCs, its pedigree was far more respectable than the anonymous Trade.xyz. Its chosen assets were also bigger names: OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most coveted targets.
However, these two companies have no imminent listing date.
It's not that there's no external reference price. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic allowed employees to sell shares this year at a $350 billion valuation, and OpenAI does similar periodically. But such prices are set behind closed doors; often in secondary share transactions, buyers and sellers are existing major shareholders, and the asset hasn't genuinely changed hands in a public market.
This pricing might be precise at times, but it lacks a public order book where everyone can participate to correct errors.
By putting such prices on-chain as contracts, Ventuals essentially hung the entire market on a couple of off-chain price feeds. Even more problematic, it added a mechanism that pits the price against itself.
Some on-chain analysts have dissected Ventuals' pricing logic:
Its oracle price, half came from external secondary transactions and funding round valuations, and the other half came from a moving average of its own contract price. In other words, half the price was referencing itself. When buy orders pushed the price up, the moving average was pulled higher, the oracle followed suit, raising the price ceiling further, inviting more buying pressure.
The result was that contracts for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., were perpetually pinned near their upper limits, with sell orders and liquidations difficult to execute. The chart looked like a steady uptrend, but in reality, it was structurally stuck, having little to do with real supply and demand.
Source: Chart for MAG7 targets on Ventuals, showing intermittent candlesticks with no trades in some periods
So this kind of Pre-IPO trading wasn't so much the market telling you OpenAI's value, but rather a machine pushing the price up and then climbing higher based on the price it had already elevated.
Trade.xyz bet on an asset that would inevitably be settled by Nasdaq, with the real price as a backstop; Ventuals bet on assets existing only in internal valuations, then layered a self-referential price feed on top, leaving the price suspended in mid-air with no floor.
Shutdown Reference Prices: OpenAI $1300, Anthropic $1600
When it came time to shut down, did the last quoted price count?
To settle all positions upon closure, Ventuals needed a final price for its contracts. Its method was to freeze the 24-hour average price. OpenAI was ultimately set at $1,341.80 per share, Anthropic at $1,618.90.
These two numbers are now etched into the settlement records, becoming the final on-chain quotes for these companies.
As mentioned earlier, this price was half external reference, half moving average of its own price, perpetually climbing along the ceiling. In other words, a significant portion of $1,341.80 resulted from the machine lifting the price further based on the price it had already inflated.
It's precise down to two decimal places, but it may not be true.
The ultimate irony is that some people outside actually took this price seriously.
According to Bloomberg, employees of SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and some late-stage venture capitalists approached Ventuals, saying they used the platform to value their own equity holdings.
This needs to be examined carefully.
These individuals hold real, valuable equity; in theory, they should know best what their stock is worth. But private market valuations are only updated once a year like squeezing toothpaste; between funding rounds is a void, with no indication of price movement.
Meanwhile, a place like Ventuals, however unreliable, at least quotes a number 24/7 and shows price movements.
Thus, a paradoxical situation emerged. Those who should have the most pricing power were instead looking to a number from a retail-facing trading table for some psychological comfort.
This is the most twisted aspect of the pre-IPO pricing business.
The most coveted assets lack a fair price the most; the greater this lack, the more people are willing to grasp at anything that resembles a price, even if it's a machine-generated, self-referential figure.
Ventuals is gone, and those final prices are frozen. But the demand for such reference points likely hasn't diminished one bit.
The Pre-IPO Pricing Business: Players Flocking In
Demand hasn't waned, yet supply is increasing, and becoming more formalized.
In the same week Ventuals shut down, Coinbase launched its own pre-IPO perpetual contracts, with SpaceX as the first target, available to users outside the US.
Not just Coinbase. Polymarket uses Nasdaq data to open prediction markets for private company valuations; Citi introduced tokenized private company stock for wealth and institutional clients. The crypto side is doing it, and traditional investment banks are too.
This is no longer just small-scale experiments by a few anonymous teams on Hyperliquid. Providing a continuously tradeable price for pre-public companies is becoming a legitimate business everyone wants a piece of.
For readers in China, this demand isn't unfamiliar. IPO subscriptions involve long queues, private market shares are only allocated among institutions and high-net-worth individuals, leaving ordinary people shut out. Now, someone is posting prices for companies like OpenAI and SpaceX, allowing 24/7 trading; for many, it's the first time they can touch such assets. The demand is real.
But Ventuals' shutdown over these past six months also laid bare the Achilles' heel of this business.
A price isn't enough just because people are willing to trade it; it requires a public, open market where anyone can participate and oppose to continuously correct errors. If Coinbase takes over, this fundamental issue doesn't magically disappear. It just swaps the credibility of an anonymous team for the credibility of a bigger brand. The underlying company still isn't public, and that fair, consensus price still doesn't exist.
Will the next entity tasked with pricing it be more accurate than Ventuals? The answer might only be revealed when OpenAI actually stands before the bell on its listing day.
