Unable to buy OpenAI, retail investors are starting to stake on-chain AI unicorns

Original Title: AI』s Hottest Private Firms Have Booming Crypto Shadow Market
Original Author: Ryan Weeks and Sidhartha Shukla, Bloomberg
Compiled by: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: The valuation-fueled frenzy for private AI companies is being turned into a new retail trading product by crypto platforms.

In the past, it was difficult for ordinary investors to buy shares of unlisted companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. Now, platforms like Ventuals and PreStocks are starting to offer related trading: some people place bets on valuation changes through perpetual contracts, while others gain so-called “equity exposure” through SPV tokens. These may not represent real equity, but they allow retail investors to trade the market’s valuation expectations for these hot companies 24/7, with leverage.

What’s most worth attention in this article is not only that Anthropic has been pushed to a $1.6 trillion implied valuation on-chain, but also that the private placement market is becoming further financialized. What used to be assets accessible only to funds, brokerages, and high-net-worth investors before an IPO is now packaged as crypto products that can be traded in real time, and can be taken long or short.

But the risks are also here. These products provide price exposure, not actual shareholder rights. Trades on Ventuals are not backed by any real equity. Although PreStocks claims that its SPV corresponds to real shares, Anthropic has clearly stated that this kind of structure may have no legal value.

In other words, what retail investors buy may not be equity in AI giants, but a trade about the valuation of AI giants. The AI boom hasn’t fully entered the public markets yet, but it has already been financialized in the crypto market first.

Below is the original text:

A competition to sell AI hype entry tickets to retail investors has entered the mainstream—closed-end funds, interval funds, and special purpose vehicles are popping up everywhere. Now, crypto platforms are also starting to offer trading products related to the world’s most valuable private AI companies, and these companies have almost no other way for ordinary investors to participate.

The result is that the financialization of the private market has entered a new frontier: crypto infrastructure, once mainly used to serve digital token speculation, is being repurposed to let traders bet on companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX— and it’s real-time trading, open 24 hours a day, and available with leverage.

Ventuals and PreStocks are two crypto trading venues that have risen in line with this trend. From the beginning of this year to last month, based on open contracts and combined market value, their trading activity has grown by more than three times. Major crypto exchanges have also started launching pre-IPO assets, expanding the reach of these tools to tens of millions of users. The crypto derivatives platform Trade.xyz, built on the Hyperliquid blockchain, is also joining this track.

On Ventuals and PreStocks, traders have pushed Anthropic’s implied valuation to $1.6 trillion—twice the valuation investors gave the company in its most recent funding round.

Tokenized Private Stock Trading Surges

In recent weeks, trading volumes on crypto platforms for pre-IPO stocks have risen sharply.

These figures reflect speculative positions rather than real equity trades. They do not grant investors true ownership rights, and the way the two platforms operate is also not the same.

Ventuals is backed by the investment firm Paradigm. On the platform, traders bet on valuation changes through perpetual futures—derivatives that are not supported by any underlying assets, have no expiration date, and are not tied to any real stock trades. PreStocks takes another approach: its tokens are minted on a one-to-one basis based on SPV exposure, aiming to track real stocks in the secondary market. This means that holders hold a fractional share in a vehicle that claims to hold underlying equity; however, Anthropic has explicitly warned that such structures may lack legal value, and the company considers them invalid.

PreStocks founder Xavier Ekkel said that these SPVs come from a network composed of funds and brokerages. “SPVs have already captured most of the trading volume in traditional pre-IPO secondary markets, including transactions related to top private companies. PreStocks is built on top of this existing structure, while introducing real-time price discovery into a long-opaque market,” he said.

According to Artemis Analytics data, since Ventuals launched last November, its cumulative trading volume has reached about $500 million. Meanwhile, PreStocks’ total trading volume since September last year has exceeded $630 million.

Ventuals co-founder Alvin Hsia said that AI labs, rocket companies, and robotics startups frequently dominate headlines, but retail investors currently have almost no channels to gain exposure. “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 goes beyond its original forms focused on digital tokens, this trend has accelerated noticeably this year. Tokenized government bond funds, money market instruments, and private credit instruments have already attracted capital into blockchain channels. And these pre-IPO derivatives represent the latest frontline of this shift aimed at retail users: the same permissionless architecture that once drove meme coin speculation is now being used to bet in real time on companies like Anthropic.

Jesse Leimgruber, co-founder of OpenHome, an AI hardware maker, said he will look at Ventuals to roughly gauge how much his Anthropic shares are worth. In April, he posted on X that he received an offer for his Anthropic stock. The offer came through traditional secondary market channels, but the price was roughly in the same range as the implied valuation on Ventuals. This suggests that the on-chain derivatives market may be tracking genuine institutional demand rather than just speculative noise.

Ventuals user Luke Cannon said the platform allows him to trade more flexibly. “I used to participate in private market trading as well, but the options were quite limited—basically only long positions, and usually on multi-year timelines, waiting until the IPO,” he said.

According to Artemis data, Anthropic is currently the most popular stock on Ventuals and PreStocks. Its “tokenized interest” is twice that of competitor OpenAI. This also matches what’s happening in the broader secondary market: as investors shift toward Anthropic, OpenAI shares are losing favor.

Cannon said that after the valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic on Ventuals reached $1 trillion, he chose to short both companies’ stocks because the narrative around them is cooling.

Recently, Anthropic said that Google will invest $10 billion into the company at a $350 billion valuation. At the same time, other investors previously provided funding at an $800 billion valuation. Andrew Van Aken, head of Artemis’ stablecoin business, said that whether it’s demand from retail or from funds, appetite for exposure to this startup and its competitors is “astonishingly high.”

Earlier attempts to access these companies’ equity exposure through digital asset technology have already triggered a backlash. Last year, after questions were raised about the equity token related to OpenAI’s partnership with Robinhood Markets Inc.—a partnership involving the company led by Sam Altman—Robinhood’s stock price fell. At the time, OpenAI said in a statement that the company neither participated in the product collaboration nor endorsed it.

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