Decoding the Pricing Logic of Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts for Major IPOs like SpaceX and Cerebras.

Written by: Tanay Ved

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

Key Points

• Pre-IPO perpetual contracts create a 24/7 synthetic derivatives market for private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, allowing investors to trade and anticipate their expected valuations before they officially go public.
• The case of AI chip maker Cerebras (stock code CBRS) listing on Nasdaq confirms: The price of Pre-IPO perpetual contracts on the Hyperliquid platform deviated by only 1.3% from the stock's opening price of $350, proving the market's reliable reference value for IPO pricing.
• SpaceX is set to go public on June 12, with the current volume-weighted average price of SPCX perpetual contracts across major trading platforms at $155, while the official IPO offering price is set at $135; the total open interest across the entire market on Hyperliquid, Binance, and others exceeds $215 million, with total transaction volume reaching $2.2 billion.

Introduction

The current digital asset market has once again entered a downturn, with Bitcoin's price shrinking by about 50% from its historical peak of October 2025. However, at the same time, the capital market is experiencing the largest IPO reserve wave in history. SpaceX is scheduled to list on Nasdaq on June 12, potentially becoming the largest stock issuance ever, followed closely by Anthropic and OpenAI preparing for their listings. Ordinary investors have almost no channels to participate before these companies go public. The traditional private equity market is accessible only to accredited investors, allowing individuals to allocate a limited amount through private funds; plus, the transparency of first-level market valuations is low, with infrequent pricing updates and severe market liquidity issues.

Perpetual futures contracts based on crypto public chains are filling this market gap. The Hyperliquid platform has previously demonstrated that even when traditional securities markets are closed, crypto derivatives can still achieve 24/7 price discovery. The perpetual contracts launched on this platform, based on the HIP-3 protocol, cover categories including stocks, stock indices, and commodities, with a total transaction volume of $290 billion and total open interest of $3 billion. Now, this trading system has extended to the Pre-IPO market, where the current market demand for continuous valuation and the democratization of private assets trading is unprecedented.

This article will break down the operational logic of Pre-IPO perpetual contracts using the entire process of Cerebras's listing as a case study to verify the practical effect of the on-chain price discovery mechanism and interpret market expectations in conjunction with contract pricing across major platforms ahead of SpaceX's listing.

What are Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts?

Pre-IPO perpetual futures are synthetic derivatives specifically designed for unlisted companies, capable of continuous trading and reflecting implied valuations or expected stock prices of these companies. Traders can use this mechanism to bet on or hedge risks regarding the stock price performance after the listing, or to observe real-time market pricing expectations for new stocks. These contracts do not represent the actual equity of the company, without ownership or voting rights. The long and short parties pay a funding rate based on the price difference between the contract's current price and its fair mark price, thus maintaining a balance of contract holdings.

In addition to Hyperliquid, major centralized exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Gate.io, and OKX have also launched Pre-IPO contracts for companies like SpaceX. Within the Hyperliquid platform, contracts are divided into two sections, Trade.xyz and Ventuals, relying on the permissionless framework HIP-3, with completely different pricing rules and valuation logic for each:

Trade.xyz (Assets: CBRS, SPCX)

• The contract pricing unit is based on the expected price per share;
• The mark price is entirely sourced from the platform's internal order book, with no external data sources; the market trading behavior itself serves as a price oracle before the listing;
• After the company completes its IPO listing, the contract will automatically convert into a conventional perpetual contract linked to external market quotations.

Ventuals (Assets: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic)

• The contract pricing unit is based on the overall implied valuation of the company, measured in billions of dollars; for example, a market price of 1300 indicates a market expectation of a company valuation of $1.3 trillion;
• Uses a hybrid oracle for pricing: combines off-chain private market data (financing rounds, secondary private transaction prices, etc.) with real-time on-chain trading data to jointly generate a fair price.

Data Source: Talos Pre-IPO Perpetual Contract Market Data Dashboard

The total open contract size of all Pre-IPO markets on the Hyperliquid platform is currently about $106 million, with a cumulative transaction volume of $1.46 billion since launch, where the Trade.xyz section contributes 95% of the trading volume.

Cerebras (CBRS) Nasdaq Listing Review

AI chip manufacturer Cerebras Systems (code CBRS) went public on Nasdaq on May 14, 2026, just 13 days after the Hyperliquid Trade.xyz section launched its Pre-IPO perpetual contracts. This complete cycle directly demonstrates the on-chain market's price discovery capability for unlisted companies.

After the contract went live, the prices quoted by the market remained consistently above the reference benchmark of $175, stabilizing in the range of $280–320 in the days leading up to the listing. The investment bank ultimately set the IPO offering price at $185, but the stock's opening price on Nasdaq directly reached $350. In the last hour before the Nasdaq opening, the volume-weighted average price of CBRS contracts on the Hyperliquid platform was about $354.54, only 1.3% higher than the actual opening price, with a premium of about 89% over the IPO offering price.

Data Source: Coin Metrics Market Data Source, Yahoo Finance

Liquidity data also confirms its pricing effectiveness: trading was light in the 13 days before the contract went live, with daily transaction volumes ranging from only $600,000 to $9.6 million, as the market gradually formed a consensus around the $300 price range.

Initially, there was a significant spread between buy and sell prices when the contract launched, peaking at nearly 50%, with a median price spread of 1.04% on the first day; as the listing date approached, the spread narrowed to 0.26%, indicating that traders' expectations for consistency in the price range were steadily increasing. On the listing day, May 14, transaction volume exploded to $281 million, nearly six times the total volume of the previous 13 days, accounting for 85% of the total historical transaction volume since the contract launch, as many traders simultaneously matched the Nasdaq opening prices in speculation.

Data Source: Coin Metrics Market Data Source

The day after the listing, the open interest of CBRS contracts peaked at $57 million, after which investors gradually began to close their positions. Once the Nasdaq spot market became the external pricing benchmark, the median price spread of the contract further compressed to 0.07%, fully proving that Pre-IPO perpetual contracts possess high pricing reference value.

Market Performance in the Lead-up to SpaceX (SPCX) Listing

Cerebras provided a practical empirical case for this on-chain pricing model, and market attention quickly shifted to SpaceX, the target of the largest IPO ever. This aerospace satellite company is scheduled to list on Nasdaq on June 12, planning to issue over 555 million shares at an offering price of $135, targeting a valuation of $17.7 trillion.

On May 18, the Hyperliquid Trade.xyz section launched the SpaceX Pre-IPO perpetual contract, code xyz:SPCX. Initially, the contract price was well above the $135 offering price, with trades concentrated in the $180–200 range, corresponding to a market implied valuation close to $25 trillion. However, by June 8, the contract's implied stock price continued to converge towards the IPO offering price, falling back to the range of $160–170, indicating that as the listing date approached, early market optimism was being gradually priced in.

Data Source: Coin Metrics Market Data Source

In addition to Hyperliquid, multiple exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, Gate.io, and OKX have launched SpaceX perpetual contracts. The total open interest in the market exceeds $385 million, with a peak daily trading volume exceeding $250 million. Liquidity is highly concentrated in the two platforms of Hyperliquid and Binance, which together account for approximately $19 billion in transaction volume, representing the vast majority of the total trading volume of $2.7 billion across the entire market.

Data Source: Coin Metrics Market Data Source

Trade Execution Quality and Market Impact Costs

As the market matures, the trading experience for SpaceX contracts has significantly improved. In the early days of the Hyperliquid platform, the bid-ask spreads and transaction impact costs were high; by June 2, the hourly median spread narrowed from 1 basis point to 0.05 basis points. According to the Talos market impact model, executing 1,000 or 10,000 contracts on the platform incurs an overall execution cost of only about 5 basis points.

Conclusion

This analysis demonstrates that the Pre-IPO perpetual contract market can effectively achieve price discovery for new stocks. The Cerebras case intuitively shows: the price of synthetic derivatives deviated by only a few percentage points from the stock's opening price, achieving continuous valuation pricing. With only a few days left until the SpaceX listing, the liquidity, open interest, and execution quality of the SPCX contracts on Hyperliquid and other exchanges continue to improve, sufficiently proving that a trillion-dollar IPO project can also create a deep trading market relying on perpetual contracts before officially listing. We will continue to monitor the listing processes of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, observing the matching degree between the early pricing signals of 24/7 perpetual contracts and the actual performance of newly listed stocks, as well as studying the secondary trading landscape of these synthetic assets in conjunction with tokenized products and other derivative cross-market linkages.