Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Traders hold $79.27m of open interest in an Anthropic contract quoted at $2,147
Open interest in cash-settled Anthropic perpetuals has reached $79.27 million, with more than $20 million trading in a day, against a company that told the SEC in June it had not fixed a share count or a price.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Open interest in futures referencing Anthropic has climbed to about $79.27 million, close to a record $80 million, as traders position around a listing that has no published terms.
- CoinGlass data showed the ANTHROPIC pre-stock contract trading around $2,147, with more than $20 million changing hands in futures over a 24-hour period.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic now plans to stage the IPO in November, later than the October timetable investors had previously expected.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint There is no deliverable share and no spot venue. A trader who thinks $2,147 is wrong can only take the other side of another trader, and while the listing is pending the quote can sit far from eventual IPO terms.
- exposure Whoever eventually sets Anthropic's official price range is answering a continuously traded reference number that already exists, and the first printed range will be read against it.
- contradiction The same $79.27 million is described as early price discovery for public investors and as a measure of participation and leverage that does not indicate which way traders lean. The two readings imply very different uses for the number.
- precedent Two private names supplied about 95% of pre-IPO perpetual volume in the first half of September. Exchanges now have a working template for listing contracts on any large private company without holding a single share of it.
Against the $2 trillion Reuters reported some investors were discussing, $79.27 million of open interest is one dollar of exposure for every $25,200 of valuation being argued over [16][1][1]. The turnover is the more interesting figure: more than $20 million changed hands in futures over 24 hours against that $79.27 million book, so about a quarter of it trades in a day [2][2].
CoinGlass shows no circulating supply and no spot trading for the instrument, and Anthropic is still privately held [3]. Binance Research said pre-IPO perpetuals are cash-settled derivatives referencing an anticipated public company valuation or share price, with no underlying shares required to support the contracts [9]. Read the $2,147 print as a per-share price and a $2 trillion company implies roughly 932 million shares [3]. Anthropic, when it filed its confidential draft registration statement in June, said it had not yet determined the number of shares or their price [5].
These prices do absorb news. Binance Research said OpenAI-linked instruments rose after the company released its Astra model earlier this month and fell after Chief Executive Sam Altman signaled that its IPO could be delayed [10]. Open interest itself does not tell you direction, because every futures position has a long and a short side, so the climb to more than $160 million across the two names records participation and leverage [11][7]. Work back through the reported 179% monthly growth and the pair sat near $57 million a month ago [4].
Anthropic alone is just under half of that $160 million [5], and Binance accounts for roughly 40% of the trade [12]. A book that concentrated, with nothing deliverable behind it, is a leveraged poll of crypto traders on a number circulated by private investors, and in my view $2,147 is not yet a valuation estimate. Cash-settled contracts with no delivery link do still aggregate opinion, and the Astra and Altman moves show this market reacts to the same events an equity analyst would price.
Circle's chief executive wants the real thing. "Take the leap, Anthropic," Allaire said, urging the company to complete the transition to the public markets and arguing that concerns about volatile markets, valuation and AI safety strengthen the case for listing [13][14].
The test arrives with the public filing. If the range and the share count land near what $2,147 implies, the crypto quote will have led the underwriters. If they land far from it, the $79.27 million was a market in opinion, priced ahead of any published figure. The Wall Street Journal reported the listing is now planned for November, later than the October timetable investors had expected [6].
What to watch
- Anthropic is weighing another model release before the listing, and OpenAI's contracts moved on model news, so a launch would be the first clean read on whether the Anthropic perpetual prices product events.