Everything can be "contractualized": A revelation from pre-IPO on-chain experiments

A leading decentralized exchange, Hyperliquid, has launched perpetual contracts for pre-IPO assets like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. This innovative "contractual" approach allows speculation on these assets' valuations without physical delivery, creating liquidity for traditionally illiquid markets.

Core Innovation: The platform uses a "contractual, non-physical delivery" model via its HIP-3 infrastructure, offering up to 3x leverage. This creates a speculative market for pre-IPO valuations, bypassing strict traditional equity regulations.
Key Challenges: The sustainability of this model hinges on reliable oracle mechanisms for price data and robust risk controls, as early markets face low liquidity.
Market Context: This is part of a broader trend of "perpetual contractification" in decentralized finance (DeFi), where Real-World Assets (RWAs) and derivatives converge. Other platforms, like Injective, are also exploring tokenized stock perpetuals.
Regulatory Landscape: Current regulations, like the CFTC's "innovation exemption" in the US, provide a sandbox for such derivatives, offering room for growth despite an ambiguous overall environment.
Future Potential: If developed further, these contracts could form a "shadow market" for restricted assets, redistribute liquidity between crypto and traditional assets, and push traditional finance to adopt blockchain for efficiency.

While trading volume is currently limited, these experiments demonstrate DeFi's capacity to support complex financial products and could reshape the on-chain derivatives landscape.

How many types of assets are being traded on the blockchain?

Most of them are native crypto tokens and stablecoins. This year, however, there has been an increase in high-growth RWAs (Real-World Assets) such as bonds, stocks, and gold.

Innovation continues: Recently, leading decentralized exchange Hyperliquid launched a perpetual contract for artificial intelligence unicorn OpenAI.

Yes, based on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 infrastructure, the decentralized derivatives platform Ventures has deployed perpetual contracts with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The platform offers 3x leverage, and the open interest cap has been increased from $1 million to $3 million.

This token can be seen as a "perpetual contract" of pre-IPO assets.

This definition is highly imaginative. In traditional financial markets, pre-IPO equity transactions are strictly regulated and extremely restricted. Combining pre-IPO with perpetual contracts, without involving actual equity delivery, but rather engaging in "contractual valuation games," allows assets that would otherwise lack liquidity to "create something from nothing," thus gaining greater market potential.

The positive signs are: after the launch, the trading activity of the contracts has increased slightly, and both the trading volume and price have fluctuated within a certain range, reflecting a certain market demand for Pre-IPO asset trading.

However, the early low-liquidity market still faces many challenges: Are oracles stable? Are risk control mechanisms reliable? These are all key prerequisites for its continued development.

Regardless, the PerpDEX sector has accelerated significantly this year, and Pre-IPO Tokens have the potential to reshape the on-chain derivatives landscape.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff predicts that the perpetual contract market for "any asset" will create a billion-dollar market opportunity as finance becomes fully on-chain, with mobile applications designed for non-crypto users.

What are your thoughts on "contractual" Pre-IPO Tokens?

Core: The authenticity and credibility of price data

As part of the RWA asset range, its feasibility depends on the standardization of the underlying assets. Pre-IPO assets have a reliable price source to some extent. How to continuously, stably, and verifiably provide a price for Pre-IPO assets that is closer to the true valuation requires rigorous observation of the oracle mechanism (a third-party service tool used to obtain, verify external information and transmit it to smart contracts running on the blockchain), which is also the key to the sustainability of the entire track.

Policy arbitrage opportunities

The regulatory environment remains ambiguous. The US CFTC's "innovation exemption" provides a regulatory sandbox for innovative derivatives; the EU's MiCA primarily focuses on spot trading; and perpetual contracts still have some room for innovation.

Hyperliquid provides liquidity to unlisted assets through the "contractual, non-physical delivery" approach offered by HIP-3, which can be seen as providing an on-chain alternative to "restricted transactions".

The "innovation" brought about by native encryption

The on-chain contract speculative valuation brought about by Pre-IPO Tokens can, to some extent, reflect retail investors' views on the valuation of private companies, thus generating a wider impact.

If the market continues to develop, it has the potential to form a "shadow market for restricted trading instruments," a new market brought about by Web3 technological innovation.

Competition intensifies on the PerpDEX track

Looking at the Perp DEX sector, in order to compete for market share and liquidity, DEXs are constantly exploring new, high-growth trading instruments to attract more users.

In the initial data, trading volume of pre-IPO assets such as OpenAI was relatively limited, with the main impact concentrated on innovative experiments. However, if RWA-like perpetual contracts continue to be introduced, it could potentially lead to a redistribution of liquidity between crypto assets and traditional assets.

The wave of "contracting everything for perpetual sustainability"

2025 will be a turbulent year. On the one hand, the crypto market is in a period of intense events and is very volatile. On the other hand, RWA is on the rise and RWA + perpetual contracts are also evolving rapidly.

This is a trend of "full perpetual contractification" from crypto assets to traditional financial instruments: Prior to this, the public chain Injective had been working hard in the field of tokenized stock perpetual contracts. As of the first half of 2025, through its Helix DEX, it had accumulated a trading volume of more than $1 billion and could provide leverage of up to 25 times.

Although the current trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts is relatively limited, it is demonstrating that decentralized infrastructure has the capability to support complex financial products, laying the technical and community foundation for the large-scale on-chaining of traditional assets in the future.

This innovation will force traditional financial institutions to seriously consider how to use blockchain technology to reduce transaction costs and improve efficiency, and may ultimately drive the development of RWA tokenization and on-chain derivatives.