Disassembling the Hyperliquid perpetual contract track

Author: Thejaswini M A; Source: Token Dispatch; Compiled by: BitpushNews

Foreword

Jesse Leimgruber is the co-founder of AI hardware company OpenHome and also holds shares in Anthropic. A few months ago, he revealed on the X platform that he might be interested in selling these shares.

To keep track of the hundreds and thousands of people contacting him, each carrying cash ready to be transferred at any time.

A “very well-known growth fund” offered a valuation of up to $1.05 trillion for the company. He mentioned that a large VC even offered him the title of Managing Partner (GP) if he was willing to pledge his Anthropic shares.

He later admitted that without these shares, the partnership title wouldn't even exist. Market demand was frenzied. One banker even offered an early Anthropic employee willing to sell a small portion of their shares a $4.8 million mansion in Marin County. Another investor listed a 14-acre estate on LinkedIn, translating to an implicit company valuation exceeding $800 billion. A secondary market brokerage firm stated that some shareholders were buying shares at a valuation of $1.15 trillion. The head of brokerage firm Rainmaker Securities bluntly stated that there were no sellers in the market, only an extreme supply-demand imbalance. Leimgruber revealed that he used Ventuals to assess the value of his shares (Ventuals was an order book on Hyperliquid where traders could leverage their valuations of Anthropic). We don't know what Leimgruber ultimately did with his shares. He may have sold some, all, or none, as private equity transactions are typically not public, so based on public records, he was merely a "prospective seller." However, Ventuals later shut down, the founding team joined Phantom, and trade.xyz practically siphoned off all the liquidity on the HIP-3 protocol. Anthropic is clearly poised to become the next most sought-after publicly traded stock. But for retail investors, unless you are an accredited investor, there is virtually no way to access private equity. To become a qualified investor, you first need to be extremely wealthy. Another option is Hyperliquid's HIP-3 protocol, the very place where Ventuals once existed. Now, Entropy has replaced Ventuals on HIP-3. But why does Entropy's story tell a better tale than Ventuals'? Can we be sure it's better? Let's explore this sector. The "Autopilot" of Crypto Investing You may already be exhausted from tracking your chosen tokens. The crypto market is no joke; a misstep can leave you penniless. On October 13, 2025, Hyperliquid launched the HIP-3 protocol, allowing anyone to launch a perpetual contract DEX (decentralized exchange) on Hyperliquid. However, this requires you to have $40 million. The transaction fees here are double Hyperliquid's native fees: deployers retain 50% of the fees, and Hyperliquid uses the remaining 50% to fund token buybacks. Currently, approximately 30% of Hyperliquid's perpetual contract trading volume flows through the HIP-3 market. On August 24, 2026, Entropy met the deployment requirements for Hyperliquid HIP-3 by locking 500,000 HYPE tokens as collateral (worth $40 million, supported by a $14 million funding round led by Ribbit Capital). Entropy's ANTH token uses a market capitalization pricing (1 = $1 billion) to circumvent the unknown total number of shares outstanding. Therefore, a price of $2,000 would imply a valuation of $2 trillion. Like all assets on HIP-3, you don't actually own any stock in Anthropic, and Anthropic doesn't care about your existence. You only hold a smart contract entry on the Hyperliquid ledger. This entry mathematically tracks the implicit market capitalization price of Anthropic listed on the Entropy exchange. Regardless of whether the company goes public in the future, you have no way to convert this synthetic position into real company stock. If Anthropic is still not listed by August 18, 2028, ANTH will settle in cash based on its own 30-day average mark price. Funding rates will continue to run during this period. This contract can be redeemed without relying on the accuracy of any off-exchange data. This year, Hyperliquid's deployers tested two other pricing engines to manage pre-IPO synthetic assets. The first is the aforementioned Ventuals. It combines a hybrid valuation from the private market with its own order book price, but does not cap funding rates. The other deployer, trade.xyz, completely ignores external valuations, pricing contracts purely based on its own internal 30-minute average price. It still contributes the vast majority of HIP-3 trading volume. trade.xyz, built on Hyperunit's first HIP-3 trading pair launched in October 2025, achieved $1.3 billion in trading volume within three weeks. As the leading third-party builder on the platform, Trade.xyz accounts for more than half of Hyperliquid's total monthly trading volume. Trade.xyz's oracle relies heavily on its own internal 30-minute average trading price. It strictly limits funding rates and converted contracts to standard derivatives during the company's IPO. In contrast, Entropy uses a hybrid oracle that combines a live order book with private market valuations, assigning up to 95% weight to the order book only when depth is sufficient; otherwise, it defaults to expired secondary market tokens. Furthermore, as we mentioned earlier, Entropy lists its total market capitalization, not its price per share. To understand how far Entropy can go, Ventuals serves as a cautionary tale. It was the first platform to launch a pre-IPO perpetual synthetic marketplace for Anthropic. But the process wasn't exactly pleasant. Alvin Hsia, Emily Hsia, and Aris Samad founded Ventuals later in 2025, backed by Paradigm. They were among the first to run pre-IPO perpetual contracts on HIP-3. Margin was their first hurdle. The three founders didn't have 500,000 HYPE tokens on hand. So they created a vault called vHYPE: you deposited HYPE in exchange for tokenized credentials, the vault used these HYPEs to pay margin, and paid you staking rewards throughout the lock-up period. Traders were essentially funding the exchanges they would subsequently trade on. Ventures launched order books for OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. The first $100 million in trading volume took 73 days, while the next $100 million took only 17 days. By February 2026, the platform had surpassed $200 million in trading volume, with over 11,000 traders. Hsia later wrote that employees at SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic told him they were using this order book to anchor their companies' equity value; later-stage funds expressed the same view, as did Leimgruber. That was its peak. However, Ventuals' SpaceX contract once plummeted by 45% in a single trading day, even though nothing unexpected happened at SpaceX that day. The order book was emptied instantly, and a few orders were enough to drive the price down. The team later compensated the traders, which was a decent gesture. But Ventuals' mechanism is that as long as the deviation between its price and the actual valuation remains within 5%, it charges a standard annual fee of 15%; once the price difference exceeds 5%, the penalty fee skyrockets exponentially. Later, the annualized funding rate of the Anthropic order book was reportedly as high as 8,700%. Normally, traders would correct price errors by buying undervalued assets and selling overvalued assets. But they couldn't do that in this case. Ventuals' contracts are purely synthetic assets and cannot be settled with real Anthropic stock—especially after Anthropic restricted secondary market equity transfers. Because depositors wanted to end the one-year lock-up period early, vHYPE traded at a 20%–30% discount compared to standard HYPE. They subsequently shut down the project. Entropy sounds remarkably similar to Ventuals, so it addresses those specific pain points of the failure first. First, it limits the annualized funding rate to around 10%, preventing the 8,700% off-balance fee that caused Ventuals' collapse; second, it uses a hybrid pricing oracle, relying only on internal order book data when liquidity is ample, otherwise defaulting to private market valuation. Like Ventuals, Entropy prices Anthropic based on total market capitalization rather than individual share price.

However, Entropy lacks the simple listing conversion mechanism of trade.xyz. If Anthropic is not listed by August 18, 2028, ANTH will be settled in cash based on its 30-day average price. In the event of an IPO, Entropy states that the oracle will switch to the 1-hour average price of the mark price in the three days prior to listing, and then track the public market. Hyperliquid cannot convert market capitalization contracts to single-share contracts, so ANTH will still be listed in billions of dollars after listing. Trade.xyz, on the other hand, has used single-share pricing from the beginning, and therefore does not have this problem.

Data source: defillama

If trading volume is high but open interest remains low, this indicates that traders are rapidly entering and exiting the market, consistent with arbitrage, market making, or automated bots smoothing price spreads across platforms. Sustained, genuine demand is typically reflected in a sustained rise in open interest, as this represents traders establishing positions and holding them for the long term.

In other words, the SNDK contract maintains price accuracy because automated bots continuously align crypto exchange prices with the Nasdaq stock market in real time.

However, ANTH cannot do this because there is simply no real-time stock price to replicate. Therefore, whenever trading activity is low, ANTH contracts have to rely on outdated private valuations, historical funding rounds, or rumors. Essentially, Entropy has failed to change the reality that decentralized exchanges excel at pricing publicly traded stocks but struggle to accurately price unlisted private companies. On August 19th, a deployer named "Kraken HIP-3 test DEX" enabled star gating on the Hyperliquid testnet. Blockworks analyst Shaunda Devens discovered that it whitelisted 10 wallets and used 3 of the 5 new management tools—canceling pending orders, forced liquidation, and transferring margin out of accounts. Simultaneously, a validator registered under the name "Kraken Exchange Validator" appeared in the testnet validator registry. Neither Kraken nor Hyperliquid has confirmed whether they own the testnet DEX. Devens believes it may be real because Kraken's parent company, Payward, has deployed xStocks on HyperCore, and these three tools are a typical configuration required by a regulated compliance agency. It should not be considered an official product until officially confirmed. Entropy explicitly prohibits users from strictly regulated regions (the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, and Singapore). If these users are allowed to participate in trading in the future, it will likely be through a permissioned, centralized architecture, which is legally permitted to seize assets and manage risk, such as Kraken's model. Traditional stock exchanges (such as Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange) rely on manually formed "listing committees" to review and approve which assets can be listed for trading. Hyperliquid's HIP-3 protocol stipulates that anyone who has locked up $40 million worth of staked tokens will automatically be granted market access without needing to apply for a committee's permission. Potential Kraken testnet activity suggests that regulated financial institutions want to use this technology, but they cannot operate legally in a permissionless environment. To comply with government regulations, these institutions are adopting the HIP-3 blockchain architecture, but simultaneously re-coding their own strict rules, approved user whitelists, and human risk control teams (risk control desktops) back into the system. If Entropy succeeds, it will bridge a completely new class of private equity assets on Hyperliquid's track. If it fails… well, that will simply provide another cautionary tale for the next builder. Watching this network evolve and learn from its own mistakes is indeed fascinating. The market will eventually turn around, so the best strategy right now is to continue building while the darkness is still falling.