Anthropic-linked pre-IPO perpetuals did $643 million in volume across 12 crypto venues through Sept. 21, according to data compiled by the exchanges. That's more than the $590 million the contracts traded in the whole of August, and there were still nine days left in the month when the snapshot was taken.
About $80 million in Anthropic-linked open interest was outstanding at the September snapshot. On Binance alone, open interest in the contract rose 88% over 30 days, to $31.2 million from $16.6 million.
The IPO keeps moving
Anthropic filed a confidential draft IPO registration in June. Reports this week suggested the debut may slip past the November US midterm elections. That's the third time the timeline has been nudged, and the perpetuals have been repricing around each one.
Over the weekend, as those reports circulated, Binance's ANTHROPICUSDT perpetual fell 0.89% to $2,084 from $2,103. A sub-1% move on a listing-timetable headline is not a panic. It's the kind of drift you get when nobody is sure what the contract is supposed to be tracking.
How Binance prices a company that isn't public
Binance's mark price for the Anthropic perpetual comes from recent trading in the contract itself — an average of recent prices, with a cap on how far the mark can move from one second to the next. That design keeps the contract tethered to its own order book rather than to a stock that doesn't exist yet.
Once Anthropic lists and Binance has a stable third-party stock-price index, the exchange says it can convert the pre-IPO perpetual into a standard equity-linked contract. It issues a transition notice when that happens.
Binance has done this before. When SpaceX listed in June, the exchange kept existing positions and open orders in place while it shifted the mark price toward a stock index. That transition took as long as three hours. FalconX said SpaceX perpetual open interest had exceeded $300 million before the IPO and peaked 11 days after the listing. Average daily perpetual volume across venues hit $2.2 billion in the 30 days following SpaceX's debut, and Binance's own average daily SpaceX perpetual volume climbed to about $1.6 billion from roughly $89 million pre-IPO.
The OpenAI problem isn't going away
Anthropic isn't the only private AI company with a perpetual market. Combined open interest in Anthropic and OpenAI pre-IPO perpetuals passed $160 million as of Sept. 15, up from roughly $1 million in April. That's a steep ramp for contracts with no underlying shares to settle against.
OpenAI's situation is messier. Sam Altman has said the company will not go public in 2026, which leaves its pre-IPO contracts without a listed share price to force any reconciliation this year. The contracts will keep trading on sentiment and order-book flow, and holders have no IPO date to anchor to.
The concrete thing to watch is the Anthropic filing. If the debut does slip past the midterms, the pre-IPO perpetuals stay in their current state — priced off their own recent trades, with no third-party index to convert against — until a listing date is finally set. Binance's conversion mechanics are ready. The company isn't.
