--- title: "The pre-IPO market is rapidly migrating to on-chain technology." type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/287007013.md" description: "The pre-IPO market is shifting towards on-chain technology, highlighted by TradeXYZ's launch of the first pre-IPO perpetual contract for Cerabras (CBRS) on Nasdaq. The IPO, priced at $185, saw an opening price of $350, allowing broader investor participation. This innovative trading model contrasts with traditional IPOs, which often have high oversubscription rates. Upcoming IPOs, like SpaceX, are expected to set records, with Cerabras raising $1.7 billion through private placements. Companies are also tightening share transfer rules to regulate the primary equity market." datetime: "2026-05-20T04:50:38.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/287007013.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/287007013.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/287007013.md) --- # The pre-IPO market is rapidly migrating to on-chain technology. Source: Castle Labs; Compiled by: Shaw, Jinse Finance 2026 is one of the busiest years for IPOs, boasting the largest IPO schedule in decades. ... Last Thursday, TradeXYZ's first pre-IPO perpetual contract (IPOP) instrument, Cerabras (ticker symbol: CBRS), officially debuted on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. Its IPO price was repriced at $185, and its opening price on the first day of trading reached $350. Pre-IPO perpetual contracts (IPOPs) are synthetic perpetual trading instruments used to map the implied valuation of unlisted private companies. Traditional IPOs often have book-building oversubscription rates exceeding 20 times, making it difficult for both qualified institutional investors and retail investors to obtain their desired holdings. In contrast, Cerabras' corresponding pre-IPO perpetual contract had already been trading on the Hyperliquid platform for two weeks, with its price briefly falling below $200 in early May, allowing various types of investors to easily participate. These on-chain trading markets not only open up investment participation channels, but the prices they generate also attract significant global market attention. Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter for this IPO, closely monitored contract quotes on the Hyperliquid platform before the stock officially listed. On the morning of the IPO, Hiive, a mainstream offline primary market platform for accredited investors, gave a valuation of only $220; while at that time, only TradeXYZ provided real-time fair quotes, with an early morning quote of approximately $290, which climbed to around $340 an hour before the Nasdaq opened. Cerabras is the first pre-listing perpetual contract pilot asset launched on TradeXYZ. After its successful conversion to a standard perpetual contract (which relies on an external oracle to anchor official quotes from traditional markets during trading hours), the platform is gradually launching more related assets. SpaceX has already started trading, with its original Nasdaq listing scheduled for June 12th. This IPO will be the largest new share offering in the coming years, raising more than 30 times the amount raised by Cerabras. It is not only expected to set a record for the largest IPO in history, but will also surpass Saudi Aramco's $1.7 trillion fundraising in 2019. **** ## CBRS: Market Warm-up Phase **Over seven years, Cerabras has raised a total of $1.7 billion through five rounds of private placements.** However, ordinary retail investors previously had very limited access channels, making it almost impossible to invest in the stock through its IPO. The pre-IPO perpetual contract product launched by the TradeXYZ platform completely changed this situation. On May 1st, TradeXYZ officially launched the xyz:CBRS trading pair, with an initial reference price of $175, corresponding to an implied valuation of $489 billion for the company. In the early stages of trading on the platform, the price was not affected by external market conditions, but was entirely determined by the supply and demand of buyers and sellers, as well as market expectations for its Nasdaq opening price. Whether the IPO price was initially set in the $115-$125 range, subsequently increased to the $150-$160 range, or finally settled at $185, the valuations given by traders on the platform were consistently significantly higher than the official IPO pricing range. **Any user holding a cryptocurrency wallet can participate in the strategy through TradeXYZ; if the position is held for 14 days and the stock opens at $350 on Nasdaq, the maximum return could exceed 90%.** - Minimum Trading Unit Restriction: Due to transaction costs, securities firms generally do not accept small-scale equity transactions. Regardless of the packaging method, the above-mentioned core restriction can never be eliminated. - Direct Trading Platforms: such as Hiive and Forge, which only facilitate the direct transfer of physical shares; - Closed-End Funds: such as ARKVX, VCX, and RVI, which package unlisted equity into exchange-traded funds or periodically open products; - Collective Special Purpose Entities (SPVs): such as the Hiive Fund and EquityZen Single Entity Fund, which establish limited liability companies to correspond to the shares held in the companies; - Tokenized SPVs: such as PreStocks and Jarsy, which further issue shares of similar companies into on-chain tokens. In addition, companies planning to go public have also begun to proactively regulate the primary equity trading market. On May 11, artificial intelligence company Anthropic took significant steps to tighten its own share transfer rules, declaring all unauthorized secondary equity transfers invalid and naming eight related trading platforms. Within the same week, OpenAI also issued a similar risk warning. Crypto legal expert Gabriel Shapiro explains the legal logic: a revocable transfer can be ratified by the court, while an absolutely invalid transfer has no legal effect from the outset. This means that an entire secondary equity transaction chain can be completely erased from the company's equity register. This crackdown is not targeting a specific form of asset packaging, but rather directly addresses the underlying share transfer behavior upon which all models rely. Once an equity transfer is legally invalid, the various asset rights attached to it become meaningless. As a result, PreStocks tokens, pegged to Anthropic and OpenAI, plummeted by approximately 40% in just a few days. The synthetic perpetual contract model possesses inherent uniqueness: no physical share transfer occurs throughout the entire transaction chain. Legally, it also establishes clear boundaries—the contract only anchors to the company's implied market valuation and does not represent holding any actual equity in the company. Companies cannot declare such contract assets invalid, regulators cannot classify them as equity securities, and securities firms cannot include them in the traditional financial asset circulation system. Of course, this model also carries its own unique risks: the contract itself does not have the legal right of recourse against the underlying physical assets; the marked price is entirely determined by the platform's supply and demand, not anchored to the spot asset, and pricing is highly dependent on the platform's own liquidity. As industry expert Borja Nera stated, trading these assets essentially involves betting on the implied valuation fluctuations of a company, while also incurring risks such as funding costs, liquidity, market pricing, and settlement-related risks. Furthermore, it cannot be used for risk-free arbitrage with physical stocks. While this is by no means the safest way to invest in company equity, the value of pre-IPO perpetual contracts extends far beyond providing an investment channel; in the current climate where the demand for scarce unlisted companies is at its peak, it serves as an efficient global price discovery platform. Whether this mechanism can truly achieve real-time pricing, continuous price discovery, and large-scale access for ordinary investors remains to be seen and will require market validation. Currently, three on-chain platforms have implemented this model, and the OKX exchange has also officially entered the market in recent weeks. Among them, only TradeXYZ has completed a full IPO benchmark live trading implementation, with its contract pricing deviating from the Nasdaq opening price by less than 6%. The following will break down various track models and the core reasons why TradeXYZ has taken the lead. The Core Value of Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts Currently, four platforms have launched synthetic Pre-IPO perpetual contracts: TradeXYZ and Ventures, which rely on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 protocol; Lighter, which has built its own L2 network; and the centralized exchange OKX. Due to the different methods used by various platforms to calculate the total share capital, significant price discrepancies have emerged between different trading venues. TradeXYZ uses the actual total share capital of 11.87 billion shares disclosed by SpaceX in its S-1 prospectus after the stock split; while other platforms, having listed the relevant trading targets earlier, uniformly use an estimated total share capital of 1 billion shares. ... ## Pricing Logic of Pre-IPO Assets on Various Trading Platforms All platforms are solving the same core problem: how should the market-marked price be determined when there is no public spot market as a reference?TradeXYZ, Lighter, and OKX only use an on-exchange self-pricing model, while Ventuals tends to anchor prices to external valuation levels. However, whether referencing Hiive platform quotes, Forge transaction prices, quarterly 409A valuations, or the valuation of a company's previous round of financing, these external data sources inherently exhibit price lag. In contrast, the market-driven pricing model allows market participants to discover prices entirely on their own. If the pricing mechanism is one half of the core of this trading system, then funding rates are the other half. During periods of high market volatility, such as IPOs, holding costs are crucial. TradeXYZ has set a funding rate multiplier of 0.005 for its pre-IPO perpetual contracts (IPOP), which is only 1% of the platform's standard perpetual contract rate. As a result, xyz:CBRS had an average annualized funding rate of only +1.67% during the 14-day pre-IPO trading period. In contrast, Ventuals, Lighter, and OKX, despite a bullish market, continued to use their own conventional funding rate rules, resulting in extremely high annualized rates. For example, based on median data over a 14-day period: vntl:OPENAI had an annualized rate of 31%, vntl:ANTHROPIC reached 64%, and vntl:SPACEX also reached 39%. Taking SpaceX as an example: If a trader holds a position of xyz:SPCX from its current position until the stock officially opens on Nasdaq on June 12, the funding rate they need to pay is approximately 0.1% of the notional value of the position.However, holding the same position on the Ventuals platform, based on its median annualized funding rate of 39% over a 14-day period, the holding cost would be as high as approximately 2.7%. ## Why are funds continuously flowing into TradeXYZ? Ventuals and Lighter are struggling to keep up with the trading activity of perpetual contracts before TradeXYZ's listing. Even OKX, a centralized exchange with a global user base far exceeding Hyperliquid and consistently ranking among the top five in the industry, has lower trading volumes in related categories.TradeXYZ possesses a core advantage that other platforms lack: a mature existing user base.TradeXYZ boasts a core advantage that other platforms do not have: a mature existing user base. Since its launch on Hyperliquid in October 2025, the platform has built the largest on-chain perpetual contract trading market for real-world assets. As of May 18, 2026, the platform covers 77 trading instruments including commodities, stocks, indices, and pre-listed assets, accounting for approximately 93% of the daily trading volume and 95% of the open interest of the HIP-3 protocol. This is also reflected in the platform's data on the growth of open interest in real-world asset markets as of May 18, 2026: S&P 500 contract xyz:SP500 open interest was $489 million; XYZ100 index contract... xyz:XYZ100 holdings: $371 million; Brent crude oil xyz:BRENTOIL holdings: $316 million; WTI crude oil xyz:CL crude holdings: $167 million; Gold xyz:GOLD holdings: $114 million. The platform's capital base was built up gradually in stages. It initially launched gold and silver contracts, followed by crude oil contracts. During the conflict in Iran in late February, the daily trading volume of the crude oil contract reached $1.62 billion; when traditional financial markets were closed, a large number of traders flocked to the contract, and its short-term trading volume briefly surpassed that of the Ethereum contract on the Hyperliquid platform. Following the launch of Brent crude oil contracts, the platform subsequently introduced perpetual contracts for the stocks of seven major US tech giants. In March of this year, it officially launched the compliant perpetual contract XYZ100, which tracks the S&P 500. When this product launched in early March, its open interest was only $213 million; it has now increased to $371 million. As a result, when xyz:CBRS officially launched on May 1st, the platform already had a large user base. Traders are familiar with the trading channels and trust the operating team. Now, they can directly participate in new pre-IPO asset trading on the mature infrastructure they already use for trading gold, crude oil, and S&P 500 assets. The core reason for the success of TradeXYZ's pre-IPO asset trading business is that it is a natural extension of the overall commercialization strategy, rather than an isolated, hastily launched new project. SpaceX and Future PlansOn May 18, 2026, at 05:16 UTC, TradeXYZ officially launched xyz:SPCX, with an initial reference price of $180. In the first minute, the price surged to $204; within the first hour, the price fluctuated between $204 and $218, ultimately closing at $211.75. As of the time of writing, the market data shows: mark price $203.14, daily cumulative notional trading volume of $50.67 million, open interest of $25.49 million, and approximately 42,000 trades. SpaceX is scheduled to go public on June 12, 2026, with a target valuation of $1.75 trillion. Following closely behind are Anthropic, which plans to go public in October 2026, with a valuation range of $850 billion to $900 billion; and OpenAI, which is expected to go public sometime between the fourth quarter of 2026 and 2027, with a valuation exceeding $1 trillion. The combined valuation of these three companies reaches a staggering $3.5 trillion. For comparison, the average annual fundraising scale of the US IPO market was only about $50 billion between 2015 and 2024. Whoever can seize secondary market trading volume and firmly occupy mainstream financial market attention through price discovery will achieve great success, and TradeXYZ has already firmly established itself as an industry leader. For pre-IPO perpetual contracts, this particular stock is exceptionally noteworthy, primarily due to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He boasts the largest following across all platforms on his company's social media platform, SpaceX, and is known for influencing market trends with his personal pronouncements. On May 15th, he approved a 1-for-5 stock split for SpaceX and announced a 30% allocation to retail investors in this IPO, significantly higher than the industry standard for institutional investors. We'll have to wait and see if he can bring massive traffic and attention to the xyz:SPCX trading market. 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