The team behind Ventuals, which ran perpetual pre-IPO markets for OpenAI and Anthropic on Hyperliquid, is shutting down its operation. The project will fold into another effort within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. The shutdown freezes both markets and automatically settles all open positions using 24-hour average prices.
How the settlement worked
Ventuals stopped trading and calculated final prices based on a day-long average. The OPENAI market settled at $1,341.80 per contract, implying a valuation near $1.34 trillion for the AI company. ANTHROPIC closed at $1,618.90, putting its implied valuation around $1.62 trillion. Open positions were closed out at those levels, and no further trading is possible in those contracts.
Holders of vHYPE, Ventuals' token, can withdraw their deposited HYPE one-to-one plus any staking yield that accrued during the project's run. The team charged no deposit, withdrawal, or management fees during its lifecycle.
A short-lived but active market
Ventuals racked up more than $650 million in trading volume and attracted over 500,000 HYPE in community support. It offered a way for traders to speculate on private AI companies before any official initial public offering. But the market was small relative to Hyperliquid's overall pre-IPO category, which has logged $1.46 billion in lifetime volume as of a June 9 report from Talos.
TradeXYZ dominates that category with roughly 95% of the volume. Its open interest across pre-IPO markets sits near $106 million. The platform's Cerebras contract, for example, traded within 1.3% of the chip maker's $350 Nasdaq open in May. Its SpaceX pre-IPO market held above the $135 offering price for weeks before SpaceX opened at $150 on its June 12 Nasdaq debut and closed up about 19%.
The remaining competitor
With Ventuals gone, TradeXYZ now faces little competition on Hyperliquid's pre-IPO trading venue. That could mean tighter spreads and less incentive for TradeXYZ to lower fees, but it also removes a source of liquidity fragmentation. Hyperliquid's native HYPE token traded near $68 on the day of the announcement, up almost 12%.
Neither Ventuals nor TradeXYZ has said whether new projects might enter the pre-IPO space on Hyperliquid. For now, traders looking to bet on private companies before they go public have one dominant option left.
