Author: David, Schain TechFlow
Over the past two days, both Chinese and English CTs have been trending the same U.S. stock ticker: $CBRS.
Some said, “The acceleration was too intense,” while others remarked, “I finally felt the on-chain advantage.” An AI chip company’s IPO triggered FOMO among crypto enthusiasts.
Cerebras, NVIDIA's most direct competitor in the AI chip market, counts OpenAI and Amazon among its customers.
It listed on Nasdaq on May 14 at a price of $185, with demand exceeding supply by 20 times; underwriters even raised the pricing range twice. After opening, the price surged directly to $350, reached a high of $386 during trading, and closed at $311, with an intraday gain of nearly 90%.
According to CNBC, this is the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019, raising $5.55 billion.
However, what excites crypto traders isn't how much the stock itself rose. Some of them had already engaged in price speculation on CBRS through Pre-IPO perpetual contracts launched on Trade.xyz via Hyperliquid, two weeks before U.S. markets opened.
According to Hyperliquid News, the Pre-IPO contract for $CBRS broke all records before listing, achieving a trading volume of $127 million and an open interest of $66 million.
Hours before the IPO, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and manager of the Maelstrom Fund, posted on X that he had reviewed the on-chain quotes for CBRS on Hyperliquid and estimated the opening price at around $277. The actual opening price was $350, 26% higher than the on-chain estimate. He got the direction right but underestimated the magnitude.
The on-chain quote is 50% higher than the IPO price, though it still doesn't fully capture the frenzy surrounding AI chips. However, a trend is beginning to emerge: on-chain contract pricing, anchored by Hyperliquid, is increasingly being treated as a leading indicator for U.S. IPOs—a development that was once unthinkable.
On-chain Pre-IPO, Pre-market Price Discovery
Many people, upon seeing the words "Pre-IPO," immediately think of subscribing to new offerings.
But he is actually not related to U.S. stock IPOs at all.
According to Trade.xyz's official documentation, Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts (IPOP) are cash-settled derivative contracts that do not represent shares, provide no IPO allocations, and do not constitute any form of tokenized equity. There is no ownership, no voting rights, and no dividends. This means the bet is solely on the direction of a company’s stock price after its IPO.
The pricing mechanism also differs from standard perpetuals. Before listing, there is no external oracle to provide price data; instead, the contract uses Hyperliquid’s internal market-driven pricing, where the price is entirely determined by traders’ buy and sell orders. The funding rate is calculated based on the prior day’s mark price, using an exponentially weighted moving average.
In simple terms, there is no "correct price"—the market decides what it's worth.
This is why Arthur Hayes saw 277, but the actual opening price was 350. On-chain traders set a price based on sentiment and博弈, not information—they had no roadshow materials, no insight into institutional subscription multiples, and no access to underwriters’ bookbuilding data.
Once the company completes its IPO and sufficient external market data becomes available, the Pre-IPO contract will automatically convert into a standard perpetual stock contract, integrated with a real stock price oracle, with positions remaining unchanged and no need to close and reopen them.
For those accustomed to on-chain trading, the barrier to entry is nearly zero—just have a wallet, USDC, and connect to Hyperliquid to open a position. As the largest HIP-3 deployer in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, Trade.xyz received official authorization from S&P Dow Jones in March this year and launched the S&P 500 perpetual contract. The Pre-IPO product is its latest step, with CBRS serving as the first pilot.
According to Trade.xyz’s risk disclosure, when a contract converts from Pre-IPO to a standard perpetual, the mark price may experience a sudden jump, which could directly trigger liquidation if the position is near the maintenance margin level. Additionally, liquidity is inherently limited before the IPO, resulting in significant slippage on large orders.
So this is definitely not an IPO—it’s betting on a stock that hasn’t been listed yet, in a market with no price limits, no circuit breakers, and no closing hours. The advantage is that the market is always open; the downside is that the market is always open.
A new catalyst for HYPE?
While the CBRS pre-IPO contract has been gaining a lot of attention, focusing solely on this one product would understate the scale of what’s actually happening. Over the past week, Hyperliquid has rolled out a series of major developments, with CBRS being just the most prominent among them.
On May 12, asset management firm 21Shares launched THYP on Nasdaq, the first spot HYPE ETF in the U.S. market. According to Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart, the ETF recorded $1.8 million in trading volume and $1.2 million in net inflows on its first day, with an expense ratio of 0.3%, the lowest among similar products currently available.
On May 14, two days from now—the same day CBRS lists on Nasdaq—Coinbase announced it has become Hyperliquid’s official USDC treasury deployer, directly managing on-chain stablecoin liquidity and acquiring the USDH-branded assets from Hyperliquid’s native market.
The USDC supply on Hyperliquid has now reached approximately $5 billion, doubling year-over-year. On the same day, Circle announced an expanded role in Hyperliquid’s USDC infrastructure and added 500,000 HYPE tokens as collateral, moving closer to becoming a validator node. On the same day, HashKey Exchange in Hong Kong also launched OTC trading for HYPE.
(For reference: Channels collect fees from issuers—how does Hyperliquid open Circle’s wallet?)
Hyperliquid was previously seen as a leading player in on-chain perpetual contracts, known for its fast listing of new tokens and aggressive trading by whales—but ultimately, it remained an crypto trading platform.
This week’s developments point in another direction: traditional capital has gained access through ETFs, stablecoin infrastructure is being taken over by established players like Coinbase, and the range of tradable assets has expanded from crypto assets to traditional stocks. Together, these changes appear more like a rebranding.
Let’s return to HYPE itself.
Over the past year and a half, the narrative around this token has been “the best on-chain perpetuals exchange.” This story holds up—Hyperliquid has indeed captured more than half of the on-chain derivatives market share, generating over $56 million in monthly fees according to DeFiLlama, with over 95% of that revenue used to repurchase and burn HYPE, making it one of the top cash-generating machines in the DeFi world.
After this $CBRS, some positioning may change.
If you explain Hyperliquid to someone by saying, “It’s the place where you can trade two weeks before the US IPO,” it may have stronger appeal beyond just crypto narratives.
A contract quote from an on-chain protocol is gradually beginning to influence the core pricing mechanisms of traditional finance; regardless of liquidity and actual trading volume, this phenomenon has indeed occurred.
I believe this is significant for HYPE because it now has something it previously lacked: a story that can be understood without needing to explain it for five minutes to non-experts.
In the crypto market, the scarcity of such assets is often underestimated.
Recall that in every cycle, the tokens with the strongest price surges typically have a narrative core that can be explained in one sentence. The Pre-IPO contract has given HYPE exactly that core—and currently, it’s the only one with it.
However, Hyperliquid’s biggest current obstacle is its blockade of U.S. users, temporarily excluding the world’s largest capital market from accessing the platform. Nevertheless, opening up U.S. equities—the world’s most popular asset class—to non-U.S. users via on-chain perpetual contracts is itself a distinct market niche.
To see how much the rest of the world wants to get into U.S. stocks, just look at the FOMO on CT over the past couple of days.
There may be further opportunities to repeatedly validate this narrative logic.
This year, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all been rumored to be planning IPOs; if their Pre-IPO contracts were to appear on Hyperliquid, each instance would retell this story all over again. Of course, this is all hypothetical.