Ventuals Shuts Down After 9 Months in Pre-IPO Trading Market

Original author: Curry, Shenchao TechFlow

During the days leading up to SpaceX's IPO, pre-market prices for SPCX on Hyperliquid were flooded with activity, but few took the time to examine who was behind orchestrating this market.

Actually, this is a team called Trade.xyz—anonymous, only emerging this year—and now they hold over 90% of the open interest on Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO contracts. They’ve essentially driven the entire surge in on-chain interest around SpaceX’s Pre-IPO.

Just three days after SpaceX rang the bell, on June 15, another team in the same business announced it was shutting down.

The platform is called Ventuals, backed by Paradigm, and offers pre-market contracts similar to SpaceX’s, along with OpenAI and Anthropic. It launched earlier this year and shut down just nine months later.

Same chain, same HIP-3 mechanics, same赛道. One turned SpaceX into the largest market on the platform, while the other held OpenAI and Anthropic tightly—but ended up losing them.

Among these, the manner in which Ventuals exited is worth noting. According to its official social media post, it did not shut down due to losses; instead, the announcement stated it was acquired, with the entire team integrating into another project within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Users received their principal back at a 1:1 ratio, marking a dignified conclusion.

But that’s exactly the problem. With OpenAI and Anthropic—the two most scarce assets in the room—you’d think it was the last one that should be eliminated. What’s missing?

The company currently doing well, Trade.xyz, has remained anonymous as a team to this day.

The project’s founder only hinted at this during an interview with Hyperliquid’s founder, Jeff Yan, saying he bought his first Bitcoin for $66 in 2013 and has been an investor ever since, never launching a project—he would have left the space long ago if not for meeting Jeff.

This self-taught individual built the largest pre-market trading platform on Hyperliquid. According to Colossus, Trade.xyz has grown 38% weekly since October last year, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $130 billion.

It started with silver, then moved on to crude oil, followed by the S&P 500, and finally got to SpaceX.

It chose SpaceX—wisely.

SpaceX will ring the bell on Nasdaq on June 12, with the offering price and listing date already confirmed. Trade.xyz has listed pre-market contracts, essentially betting on an event whose outcome will inevitably be revealed—on opening day, Nasdaq will provide the true price. This true price acts like a tether, preventing the pre-market price from drifting too far. Even if the quotes deviate along the way, they will be pulled back into alignment at the moment the bell rings.

Indeed, just a few days before the SPCX listing, it was trading between $154 and $172, reflecting an expectation of a premium above the $135 offering price—and indeed, it surged higher at open.

Ventuals chose a different underlying asset.

Behind it is Paradigm, one of the top venture capital firms in crypto, with a far more reputable pedigree than the anonymous Trade.xyz. It has also secured the two most coveted names in the room: OpenAI and Anthropic.

But these two companies have no IPO dates in the near term.

There is no lack of anchor pricing for them outside. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic allowed employees to sell secondary shares this year at a $350 billion valuation, and OpenAI also does so regularly. But these prices are set behind closed doors; in secondary share transactions, the buyers and sellers are often the same existing shareholders who already hold significant stakes, and the assets are not genuinely traded on an open market.

This pricing may be accurate at times, but it lacks a public order book that everyone can participate in to correct errors.

By bringing this price on-chain as a contract, Ventuals is effectively hanging the entire market on one or two off-chain price feeds. Worse still, it has added a mechanism that pits itself against itself.

On-chain analysts have examined Ventuals' pricing logic:

Its oracle price is derived half from external historical trade and financing prices, and half from the moving average of the contract's own price. In other words, half of the price reference comes from its own movement. When buy orders push the price up, the moving average rises, causing the oracle price to follow suit, which in turn pushes up the price ceiling, allowing the price to continue climbing.

As a result, the prices of contracts like those from OpenAI and Anthropic have been consistently stuck at the ceiling, making it difficult for sell orders and liquidations to execute. The charts may appear to be steadily rising, but in reality, they are structurally stuck, with little relation to actual supply and demand.

Source: MAG7 assets on Ventuals, showing intermittent candlesticks with periods of no trading activity.

So this Pre-IPO doesn’t really reflect what the market is telling us about OpenAI’s value; it’s more like a machine pushing the price up and then climbing even higher on the level it created.

Trade.xyz bets on an asset that will eventually be delisted by Nasdaq, but with real value as a safety net if you're wrong; Ventuals bets on assets that exist only in internal quotes, layered with a self-referencing price feed, leaving their price hanging in midair with no foundation below.

It’s about to close—was the final price quoted accurate?

When Ventuals shut down, it needed to set a final price for the contracts in hand to settle all positions. Its method was to freeze the average price over the past 24 hours. OpenAI was ultimately priced at $1,341.80 per share, and Anthropic at $1,618.90.

These two numbers are now recorded in the settlement log as the final bids left by these two companies on the chain.

As mentioned earlier, this price is half based on external historical stock prices and half based on the moving average of its own price, gradually climbing toward the ceiling over the long term. In other words, a significant portion of the 1341.80 figure results from the machine further pushing up a price it itself had previously set at the upper limit.

It is accurate to two decimal places, but it may not be true.

The most ironic thing is that, at this price, some people outside still take it seriously.

According to Bloomberg, employees from SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with some late-stage venture capitalists, have approached Ventuals saying they’re using the platform to value their equity holdings.

I think this needs to be examined in detail.

These individuals hold onto their original shares, backed by real money; logically, they should know better than anyone else what their shares are worth. But in the primary market, price updates are like squeezing toothpaste—only released once a year—with a complete blackout between funding rounds, leaving no one certain whether the share price has risen or fallen in the interim.

And places like Ventuals, no matter how unreliable, at least report a number 24/7 and show price movements.

Thus, a reversed situation has emerged: those who should hold the most pricing power are instead fixating on numbers from a retail trader’s table, seeking psychological reassurance.

This is the most confusing aspect of the pre-market pricing business.

The most scarce asset lacks a fair price; the more it lacks a price, the more people are willing to grasp at anything that looks like a price—even if it’s generated by a machine trading with itself.

Ventuals has shut down, and those two final prices have remained frozen. But the need to look at such numbers for reference is surely unchanged.

Demand hasn't decreased, but supply has been increasing and becoming increasingly regulated.

In the same week that Ventuals shut down, Coinbase launched its own pre-market perpetual contracts, with the first underlying asset being SpaceX, available to users outside the United States.

It’s not just Coinbase. Polymarket has launched a prediction market for private company valuations using Nasdaq data, and Citi has introduced tokenized shares of private companies for its wealth and institutional clients. Crypto players are doing it, and traditional investment banks are too.

This is no longer just a small-scale effort by a few anonymous teams on Hyperliquid. Providing a tradable price for private companies is becoming a legitimate business that everyone wants a share of.

For readers in China, this demand is not unfamiliar. Getting new stock offerings requires waiting in line, and allocations in the primary market are only available to institutions and high-net-worth individuals—ordinary people can’t even get through the door. Now, with companies like OpenAI and SpaceX listed for trading 24/7, many are encountering such assets for the first time. The demand is real.

But Ventuals' shutdown has clearly exposed the Achilles' heel of this business over the past six months.

Price isn't just about people being willing to trade—it requires an open, transparent market where anyone can challenge and correct mispricings. Switching to Coinbase doesn't automatically fix this fundamental issue. It merely replaces the banner of an anonymous team with a more prominent brand. The underlying company is still not publicly listed, and a fair market price still doesn't exist.

Will the next person to price it do so more accurately than Ventuals? The answer may not be known until OpenAI actually stands at the bell.