Perpetual contracts and prediction markets have jointly anchored the implied valuation of Anthropic at around $1.9 trillion.
Written by Ma He, Foresight News
In early October, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Anthropic is targeting mid-November for its earliest listing timeline. The company may kick off its official IPO roadshow during the week of November 9, aiming to begin trading before Thanksgiving on November 26, with the latest estimated completion of the listing scheduled before the end of the year.
In addition, per the latest Polymarket data, market bets that Anthropic will complete its IPO before November 20 this year stand at 66%!,(MISSING) while bets that the IPO will happen before December 31 this year are priced at 87%!.(MISSING)
Reuters and The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Anthropic’s target listing venue is the Nasdaq, though no official final confirmation has been announced yet. The company has not yet disclosed its stock ticker or IPO price range, but trading around its valuation has been active in crypto markets for months.
Two parallel pricing systems are offering clues. The first is perpetual contracts, traded on venues including Binance, Bitget, Hyperliquid and others. The second is prediction markets, where a matrix of Anthropic-related contracts on Polymarket covers variables such as IPO timing, first-day closing market capitalization, and more.
The former delivers a single point estimate, while the latter outputs a full probability distribution. Overlaying the two creates a complete pricing picture that traditional investment banks would never disclose ahead of a roadshow, but is now publicly accessible to all.
Pre-IPO Pricing Nears $2 Trillion
What makes the Pre-IPO perpetual contract pricing mechanism unique is that it has no spot index to anchor to. For contracts tracking publicly listed companies, the funding rate is designed to tether contract prices close to the underlying stock price. For Anthropic, however, there is no existing stock price to anchor to — the only underlying the contract tracks is holders’ own expectations of the future.
This gives such quotes an inherent sentiment-amplifying trait.
On centralized exchanges, Binance’s ANTHROPICUSDT contract, which uses an estimated 1 billion shares as its face value base, is currently quoted at $1898, with a 24-hour trading volume of $17 million, implying a valuation of $1.898 trillion. Bitget’s contract is quoted at $1902, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $12 million, implying a valuation of $1.902 trillion. For OKX, which uses an estimated total share count of 10 billion, its perpetual contract is currently quoted at $193, implying a valuation of $1.94 trillion.
For on-chain perpetual contracts, the ANTH market operated by Entropy, a HIP-3 deployer on Hyperliquid, is quoted at $1927, with a 24-hour trading volume of $12.18 million and open interest exceeding $46 million, implying a valuation of $1.927 trillion.
The implied valuations across these venues are highly consistent.
This level marks a 100% premium to the $965 billion post-money valuation Anthropic secured in its $6.5 billion Series H funding round on May 28 — and no new primary market pricing has been recorded to underpin this valuation in the five months since.
According to a draft IPO prospectus obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic recorded $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, up from $1.1 billion in the same period last year. It posted a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half, compared to a net loss of $13 billion in the prior-year period. Its revenue grew more than 10x, while its net loss expanded roughly 6x.
Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing power and infrastructure in the first half of the year, compared to $7.3 billion in total related spending for full-year 2025. The company has committed to roughly $450 billion in cloud computing contract expenditures over the next 7 to 10 years. In addition, it has pledged to pay more than $160 billion for leased Google chips. Total committed future infrastructure spending for Anthropic now exceeds $600 billion, and could rise by up to $150 billion more if ongoing negotiation deals are finalized.
Narrative around an AI bubble has led some market participants to worry about the sustainability of Anthropic’s revenue.
The recent sharp selloff in U.S. semiconductor stocks has also cast a shadow over market sentiment.
It is worth noting that Anthropic does not recognize these trading activities at the corporate level. Its official investor communications warn that any equity transfer not approved by the board of directors is invalid, and states that third parties selling interests via special purpose vehicles (SPVs) or tokenized securities “are either committing fraud, or offering products that may be worthless.”
Contracts on both Binance and Hyperliquid are cash-settled synthetic derivatives, with no underlying share delivery — this is exactly how they circumvent transfer restrictions and enable 24/7 continuous price quoting.
Prediction Markets Price Valuations Between $1.75 and $2 Trillion
If perpetual contracts answer the question “How much is Anthropic worth?”, prediction markets answer a different question: What valuation range will Anthropic ultimately settle at?
Pricing on Polymarket is aligning with this dynamic.
Per latest data, market bets that Anthropic’s first-day closing market capitalization will fall in the $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion range carry a cumulative probability of 77%!,(MISSING) though significant disagreement remains across more granular valuation buckets.
The probability of a $1.5 to $1.75 trillion valuation is priced at 19%!,(MISSING) 27%!,(MISSING) for the $1.75 to $2 trillion bucket, 18%!,(MISSING) for the $2 to $2.25 trillion bucket, and 13%!.(MISSING) for the $2.25 to $2.5 trillion bucket.
The $1.75-$2 trillion bucket is the modal outcome at 27%!(MISSING) while the combined probability of a valuation “no less than $2 trillion” has dropped from roughly 48%!(MISSING) a week ago to around 40%!.(MISSING) The expected value of the full distribution is roughly $1.92 trillion, nearly identical to on-chain perpetual contract quotes — the two markets are validating each other, and point to the same conclusion: both are nearly 30% more expensive than the $1.5 trillion price inquiry range for the IPO.
Differences in settlement rules have created price gaps both within and across prediction markets. Kalshi uses “IPO announcement” as its settlement trigger, and its contract for “IPO announcement before November” jumped from 4.7%!(MISSING) on September 28 to 16%!;(MISSING) on September 30. Polymarket, by contrast, requires “actual listing and open trading” as its settlement condition, a much higher bar. These systematic pricing deviations highlight a key fact: in prediction markets, settlement rules themselves represent pricing power.
These Markets Accurately Predicted SpaceX’s Listing Price Range In The Past
The accuracy of perpetual contracts and prediction markets was put to the test when SpaceX went public in June this year.
On the eve of the pricing date, contracts on Binance and Hyperliquid were quoted at roughly $165, representing a 22%!,(MISSING) premium to the $135 IPO offer price. Polymarket traders priced an 84%!(MISSING) probability that SpaceX’s first-day closing market cap would exceed $1.8 trillion, and a 69%!(MISSING) probability that it would exceed $2 trillion.
The next day, SpaceX opened at roughly $150 and closed at $160.95, up 19.2%!,(MISSING) from its offer price, with a closing market cap of $2.1 trillion. Perpetual contract quotes were only about 2.5%!,(MISSING) higher than the actual first-day closing price, and both market cap thresholds priced on Polymarket were fully realized.
SpaceX’s listing also exposed flaws in this trading ecosystem.
The actual share count disclosed in the S-1A filing was 10%!,(MISSING) higher than initial estimates. Binance chose to adjust contract face values by a 1.1x multiplier, OKX had pre-built a 12.52x basis switch, while Trade.xyz refused to make adjustments. These three different rules generated quotes that differed by as much as 10%!(MISSING) at the same time, creating cross-venue arbitrage windows, and leading to liquidation of highly leveraged long positions on platforms that stuck to the old basis.
Across the full listing cycle, SpaceX Pre-IPO derivatives recorded cumulative trading volume of several billion dollars.
Lessons from that cycle have become clear: perpetual contracts excel at pricing “first-day closing” outcomes, while prediction markets excel at pricing “thresholds and probability distributions.”
Anthropic’s IPO will present the second test of this system, but the parameters are different. SpaceX’s offering was heavily oversubscribed, backed by Elon Musk’s high public profile.
Anthropic’s price inquiry was revised down from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion on the eve of its listing, while on-chain perpetual contract quotes remain anchored above $1.9 trillion.
The answer may be revealed in the coming weeks.