Reports from Woofun AI indicate that Anthropic is expected to go public in October, a prospect that has directly fueled explosive growth in the on-chain Pre-IPO market. As one of the most closely watched events in this sector during the second half of the year, market deployer Entropy on Hyperliquid launched the ANTH perpetual contract targeting Anthropic on August 25, marking a new phase in synthetic asset pricing.

Within just one week of listing, the ANTH contract price on the Entropy platform climbed to $1,979.0. Based on its specific valuation rules, this quote implies a company valuation of approximately $1.98 trillion. Notably, this differs by only 1% from the target valuation of roughly $2 trillion for Anthropic reported by media outlets in August. As of 10:00 on September 2, data compiled by Woofun AI shows that the ANTH contract recorded a 24-hour trading volume of $9.63 million, with open interest valued at $9.3 million, reflecting strong early market activity.

However, Entropy is not the only channel for gaining Pre-IPO exposure to Anthropic. Currently, there are over a dozen venues offering such exposure, with products falling into three distinct structures, resulting in quotes ranging from $872 to $1,946. The risk levels and pricing logic behind these products vary significantly. This price dispersion reflects the market's differentiated assessment of risk premiums across product structures, and investors must carefully scrutinize the underlying asset support of each product.

Looking back at the first half of the year, SPV tokenization was the mainstream approach for Pre-IPO exposure, with its core narrative claiming real share backing. PreStocks is a representative of this model, where the platform holds company shares through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and sells fractional exposure to retail investors, claiming tokens are 1:1 backed by the SPV's exposure to underlying company shares. PreStocks' Anthropic token hit an all-time high of $1,408.85 on May 9.

However, May 13 became a key turning point when Anthropic issued an official statement explicitly prohibiting SPVs from acquiring its shares, stating that any transfer of shares to SPVs is invalid, and unauthorized transfers will not be recognized on the company's books. The statement also named intermediaries such as Open Door Partners, Hiive, and Forge. Following this blow, PreStocks' Anthropic token plunged 34% within seven days, completely collapsing the "backed by real shares" narrative. Currently, the ANTHROPIC token on Solana is quoted at $871.75, with a market cap of approximately $6.44 million, a 24-hour trading volume of only $411,000, and a circulating supply of 7,383 tokens, primarily traded on decentralized exchanges like Meteora and Raydium, with significantly diminished liquidity.

Another popular approach in the first half of the year was the subscription model, represented by MSX. This model does not operate as a continuous trading market but is closer to an IPO subscription, where the platform opens subscription windows at self-determined prices and then opens repurchase windows, with no buyer-seller matching throughout. The second phase of MSX's Anthropic subscription opened on May 16 with a subscription price of 855 USDT, corresponding to a valuation of $950 billion. Repurchase applications are currently open, but the exact redemption price has not yet been announced.

In contrast, synthetic perpetual contracts rose rapidly in the second half of the year. On June 2, just hours after Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC, Binance was the first to list the ANTHROPICUSDT Pre-IPO perpetual contract at around $1,734. Bitget followed suit around the same time, with Kraken listing on June 15 and Coinbase (COIN.US) on June 22, with Bybit subsequently joining. All of these products are purely synthetic, cash-settled contracts that do not involve actual equity. That same month, the on-chain early Pre-IPO perpetual platform Ventuals ceased operations, creating a brief gap in the on-chain market until Entropy launched ANTH on August 25 to fill the void.

The pricing mechanism and risk exposure of synthetic perpetual contracts are key to understanding the current market. The ANTH contracts on Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, Bitget, and Entropy all fall into this category, where users hold no shares or certificates, only leveraged price contracts for long or short positions. Platforms use different estimates for total share count: Binance and Bitget price based on 1 billion shares; OKX executed a 10:1 rebase on June 30, 2026, changing its estimated share count to 10 billion, so its quotes are approximately one-tenth of other platforms, though the implied company valuation remains consistent. Entropy's pricing is more direct, with every $1 in contract price representing $1 billion in market cap, so Binance's $1,967.0 corresponds to approximately $1.967 trillion in valuation, while Entropy's $1,980.1 corresponds to approximately $1.980 trillion.

The biggest risk with these products is the lack of external price anchoring. The three platforms that disclose their methodologies are highly consistent in approach: Binance's mark price is the average of the platform's most recent 10-second transaction prices; Kraken uses its own PreMarket synthetic index, derived entirely from the contract's own order book without external data sources; Entropy's oracle aggregates its own order book EMA with private placement data on a weighted basis, with self-weight capped at 95% and external data retaining at least 5%, making it the only platform that reserves room for external data. Perpetual contracts typically rely on funding rates to pull prices back to the oracle, but Entropy has adjusted its funding rate to 1/800 of normal levels, citing slow updates in private placement data and arguing that high fees would punish fast-moving traders, at the cost of the funding rate only countering extreme, persistent deviations.

If Anthropic does not go public, Entropy's ANTH has a defined settlement date of August 18, 2028, when it will be cash-settled based on the 6-month trailing TWAP of the mark price, with the operator retaining the right to settle early based on a 30-day TWAP and to modify terms. Kraken, on the other hand, has no expiration date, and after the company goes public, the contract will be converted to a regular stock perpetual based on the xStocks spot price. For example, SpaceX went public on June 12 at an offering price of $135 (corresponding to approximately $1.77 trillion in valuation), opened at $150 on the first day, closed at $160.95, gaining 19.2%, with a closing market cap exceeding $2.1 trillion. Prior to the listing, SpaceX perpetual quotes across platforms ranged from $162 to $180, implying a valuation of $2.1 trillion to $2.3 trillion, which was 20% to 35% above the offering price but almost exactly matched the first-day closing market cap. This suggests that perpetual contracts predict the price the market is willing to pay, not intrinsic value.

The combined open interest for ANTHROPIC perpetuals across 12 exchanges totals approximately $46.32 million, and with Entropy's $9.3 million, the network-wide total is approximately $55.62 million, differing from the $1.98 trillion valuation by a factor of about 36,000. Such a minimal capital base supporting such a massive valuation, combined with closed pricing sources and extremely low funding rates, suggests a more reasonable interpretation: on-exchange traders are forming consensus based on the same batch of IPO reports rather than engaging in independent price discovery.

In summary, prices in the Anthropic Pre-IPO market reflect participant sentiment and expectations more than the company's intrinsic value. Investors should be cautious about treating such synthetic asset prices as accurate valuation references, and instead view them as trading instruments for market sentiment. Without real equity backing and effective external anchoring, these prices are highly susceptible to market fervor and liquidity fluctuations, requiring careful handling.