Editor's Note: The valuation boom in AI private companies is being turned into a new retail trading product by crypto platforms.
In the past, retail investors found it difficult to buy shares in private companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. Now, platforms such as Ventuals and PreStocks are offering related trading: some use perpetual contracts to bet on valuation changes, while others gain所谓「equity exposure」through SPV tokens. These do not necessarily represent actual equity, but allow retail investors to trade expectations of these popular companies’ valuations 24/7 with leverage.
What’s most noteworthy about this article isn’t just that Anthropic’s on-chain market has been pushed to a $1.6 trillion implied valuation, but that private market assets are being further financialized. Assets that were once accessible only to funds, brokerages, and high-net-worth investors are now being packaged into crypto products that can be traded in real time and long or shorted.
But that’s where the risk lies. These products offer price exposure, not actual shareholder rights. Trades on Ventuals are not backed by real equity, and although PreStocks claim to correspond to actual shares via SPVs, Anthropic has explicitly stated that such structures may have no legal validity.
In other words, retail investors are not necessarily buying equity in AI giants, but rather trading on the valuation of AI giants. The AI boom has not yet fully reached public markets, but it has already been financialized in the crypto market.
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The race to sell retail investors a ticket to the AI boom has entered the mainstream—with closed-end funds, interval funds, and special purpose vehicles now emerging. Now, crypto platforms are also offering trading products tied to the world’s most valuable private AI companies, which have offered little other access for ordinary investors.
As a result, the financialization of private markets has entered a new frontier: crypto infrastructure, once primarily serving digital token speculation, is now being repurposed to allow traders to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX—with real-time trading, 24/7 availability, and leverage.
Ventuals and PreStocks are two crypto trading venues that have emerged in response to this trend. From the beginning of this year until last month, their trading activity, measured by combined open interest and market value, has more than tripled. Major crypto exchanges have also begun listing pre-IPO assets, extending access to these instruments to tens of millions of users. The crypto derivatives platform Trade.xyz, built on the Hyperliquid blockchain, is also entering this space.
On Ventuals and PreStocks, traders have pushed Anthropic's implied valuation to $1.6 trillion, twice the valuation assigned by investors in its most recent funding round.
Trading in tokenized private stocks is surging
In recent weeks, trading volume on crypto platforms offering pre-IPO stocks has surged significantly.
These figures reflect speculative positions, not actual equity transactions. Neither grants investors true ownership, and the two platforms operate differently.
Ventuals is backed by the investment firm Paradigm, and traders on the platform bet on valuation changes through perpetual futures—derivatives with no underlying asset, no expiration date, and no linkage to actual stock trading. PreStocks takes a different approach: its tokens are minted on a one-to-one basis against SPV exposure, designed to track real stocks on the secondary market. This means holders own a share of a vehicle that claims to hold the underlying equity; however, Anthropic has explicitly warned that such structures may lack legal validity, and the company treats them as invalid.
Xavier Ekkel, founder of PreStocks, said these SPVs come from a network of funds and brokers. “SPVs already account for the majority of trading volume in the pre-IPO secondary market, including transactions related to top private companies; PreStocks builds on this existing structure while introducing real-time price discovery to a market that has long been opaque.”
According to Artemis Analytics data, since its launch in November last year, Ventuals has achieved a cumulative trading volume of approximately $500 million; since September last year, PreStocks has surpassed $630 million in total trading volume.
Alvin Hsia, co-founder of Ventuals, said that AI labs, rocket companies, and robotics startups frequently dominate the news, but retail investors currently have almost no access to exposure to these sectors. “Ventuals connects public interest in transformative technologies with real, tradable markets,” he added.
Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.
These platforms are among the latest examples of crypto infrastructure being repurposed for real-world assets. As crypto technology matures and moves beyond its initial applications centered on digital tokens, this trend has accelerated noticeably this year. Tokenized government bond funds, money market instruments, and private credit tools have already drawn capital onto the blockchain. These pre-IPO derivatives represent the newest frontier of this shift面向 retail investors: the same permissionless infrastructure that once fueled meme coin speculation is now being used to bet in real time on companies like Anthropic.
Jesse Leimgruber, co-founder of AI hardware manufacturer OpenHome, says he checks Ventuals to get a rough estimate of the value of his Anthropic shares. In April this year, he posted on X that he received an offer for his Anthropic shares from a traditional secondary market channel; the price was roughly in line with the implied valuation on Ventuals, suggesting that the on-chain derivatives market may be tracking genuine institutional demand rather than just speculative noise.
Ventuals user Luke Cannon said the platform enables him to trade with greater flexibility. "I've participated in private market trades before, but the options were very limited—mostly just long positions, and you typically had to wait years until an IPO."
According to Artemis data, Anthropic is currently the most popular stock on Ventuals and PreStocks, with its "tokenized interest" twice that of its competitor OpenAI. This mirrors the broader trend in the secondary market, where OpenAI shares are losing favor as investors shift toward Anthropic.
Cannon said he shorted the stocks of OpenAI and Anthropic after their valuations on Venture Capital reached $1 trillion, citing a cooling of the related narrative.
Anthropic recently stated that Google will invest $10 billion in the company at a $350 billion valuation; meanwhile, other investors have previously funded the company at an $800 billion valuation. Andrew Van Aken, head of Artemis’s stablecoin business, said demand for exposure to this startup and its competitors is “uniformly astonishingly high” among both retail investors and funds.
Previously, attempts to gain equity exposure to these companies through digital asset technology have sparked backlash. Last year, Robinhood's stock declined after OpenAI questioned equity tokens introduced by Robinhood Markets Inc. related to the company led by Sam Altman. At the time, OpenAI stated in a statement that it had not participated in or endorsed the product.