No share price, no share count, no final valuation — Anthropic has settled none of it. That hasn’t stopped crypto traders from putting close to $80 million on the table.
Futures tied to the maker of Claude now carry roughly $79.27 million in open interest, a whisker below the $80 million record, as traders jockey for position ahead of what may turn out to be one of the biggest initial public offerings ever attempted. The entire pile has accumulated while the company stays private and its confidential draft filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission remains under seal.
What a $2,147 print actually measures
According to CoinGlass, the ANTHROPIC pre-stock contract was changing hands near $2,147, with futures volume topping $20 million across a 24-hour window. Binance dominates the trade, handling about 40% of the flow.
The fine print matters before anyone mistakes that figure for a share price. The contract is not Anthropic equity. CoinGlass records no circulating supply and no spot market for the instrument, and Anthropic has no listed shares for it to follow. What traders are pricing is a derivatives market’s guess at what exposure to a company nobody can buy yet ought to be worth.
That gap between contract and company grows more significant every month as crypto venues spin up markets around Silicon Valley’s most valuable private firms. The practical effect is that price discovery gets under way before conventional equity investors ever see the underlying shares.
Five months, from $1 million to $160 million
Anthropic isn't a one-off. Binance Research puts combined open interest in Anthropic and OpenAI pre-IPO perpetuals above $160 million this month — up from about $1 million in April and 179% higher than a month ago. Between them, the two companies absorbed roughly 95% of pre-IPO perpetual volume over the first 14 days of September.
Unlike tokenized stocks, which sit on top of real securities, pre-IPO perpetuals are cash-settled derivatives that reference an expected public valuation or share price. Binance Research noted that the contracts need no underlying shares behind them; traders are simply taking opposing sides of a wager on the company’s eventual worth.
That design means crypto markets can respond to corporate developments almost instantly. Binance Research pointed to OpenAI-linked instruments climbing after the company shipped its Astra model earlier this month, then sliding after Chief Executive Sam Altman hinted the IPO might slip.
Why a big open-interest number isn’t a bull case
A near-record $80 million looks, at first glance, like a crowd betting on Anthropic’s upside. The figure says no such thing. Every futures position pairs a long with a short, so growing open interest chiefly signals more participants and more leveraged exposure — not which way the crowd is leaning.
What it does create is a continuously traded crypto reference price for Anthropic, in place before Wall Street has an official IPO price of its own. Whether that reference is worth anything remains unresolved.
A November window and a $2 trillion figure
Anthropic lodged a confidential draft registration statement with the SEC in June, saying at the time that neither the number of shares nor their price had been decided.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that some investors were floating a $2 trillion valuation — a level that would rank the offering among the largest ever attempted. The Wall Street Journal has since reported that Anthropic intends to hold the IPO in November, pushing past the October window investors had anticipated. With competition against OpenAI heating up, the company is also weighing the release of another AI model before the listing.
Circle’s chief tells Anthropic to get on with it
As the speculative market swells, Circle Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire has been openly urging Anthropic to complete its move into the public markets.
“Take the leap, Anthropic,” Allaire said, contending that worries over volatile markets, valuation and AI safety make the argument for greater scrutiny stronger, not weaker.
Allaire speaks from experience. He took Circle, the USDC issuer, public in June 2025 at $31 per share, with the total offering reaching roughly $1.2 billion once shares sold by existing holders and the full exercise of the underwriters’ overallotment option were counted.
Going public, he said, brought audited financial reporting, quarterly disclosures, independent board governance and Sarbanes-Oxley controls — all of which made Circle simpler for banks, governments and enterprise customers to assess.
Frontier AI companies are nearing the same juncture as their technology becomes woven into businesses and economic infrastructure, Allaire argued. Model capabilities, safety procedures, computing commitments, revenue concentration and corporate governance are increasingly questions of public interest, he said, yet much of that information remains locked inside private firms.
An IPO would compel Anthropic to reveal far more about its finances, dependencies and risks, and would subject management decisions to investors, regulators and recurring reporting obligations. Allaire was also clear that an IPO is no stand-in for AI regulation, citing stablecoins as a case where, in his view, public-market discipline and clearer rules matured side by side.
Two markets, one open question
Anthropic is converging on the public markets from two sides at once. Traditional investors are holding out for a prospectus and the financial disclosures they need to decide whether a valuation near $2 trillion stands up. Crypto traders have skipped the wait and stacked nearly $80 million in outstanding futures positions on a market attempting to answer that question in real time.
Once Anthropic’s registration documents go public, the distance between the two should shrink — and that is when the pre-IPO contracts face their real test. Traders will finally be able to weigh the assumptions embedded in a $2,147 print against the revenue, costs, risks and share structure Anthropic lays out for prospective shareholders. Until that day, the crypto price is a bet on a filing nobody outside the company has read.