Anthropic files for Nasdaq listing: is the ANTH perp a stock substitute?

Anthropic filed the prospectus for its stock market listing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. Long before the first share changes hands, a bet on it is already running on the trading venue Hyperliquid. Buyers there do not get a share, though. They get an open-ended futures contract on an estimated valuation.

What the prospectus says: Class A, Nasdaq Global Select Market, ticker ANT

Anthropic PBC has been on the SEC register with an S-1 filing since October 26, 2026. The prospectus contains the sentence that matters for the listing: the company has applied to have its Class A shares quoted on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Anthropic is incorporated under the law of the US state of Delaware as a public benefit corporation, that is, a company with a public-good purpose written into its charter alongside the profit motive.

Two figures are still missing from the document, and they are the two that count most. The number of shares on offer appears as a gap in the text. On the price range, the prospectus says only that the issue price per share will fall between two amounts that are not yet named. While those fields stay empty, there is no official price for a bet to orient itself by. You can read the prospectus in the original; it sits publicly in the SEC register.

The prospectus names no timetable. According to an October 26 report by CoinDesk, the company is aiming to price the offering in mid-November; the same report has the Financial Times expecting a valuation of between $1.5 trillion and $1.75 trillion. Those are expectations held by market participants and observers, not figures from the filing itself.

$16.3 billion in revenue, a $693 million operating loss

The prospectus discloses the numbers for the first half of 2026. Revenue came in at $16.286 billion, up from $1.163 billion in the first half of 2025. Total operating expenses ran to $16.979 billion. That leaves an operating loss of $693 million on revenue that has grown more than tenfold in the space of a year.

The annual series before that reads as follows: $41 million of revenue in 2023, $386 million in 2024, $4.585 billion in 2025. The largest expense line is compute and infrastructure, at $8.945 billion in the first half of 2026 alone. For cash and short-term investments, the balance sheet shows a position of $131.651 billion as of June 30, 2026.

The $80.7 billion loss: what sits behind the headline

Many reports on the prospectus carry the figure of $80.7 billion as the loss for the first half. The figure is correct, and it misleads the moment anyone treats it as an operating result. Of that amount, $72.388 billion falls on a single balance sheet line: the change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and so-called SAFEs, agreements on future equity.

The prospectus explains that line itself. It traces mostly to the fair value of the outstanding convertible notes rising because the valuation of the company has risen. There is no cash flow behind it, only a revaluation on the balance sheet. The higher an investor rates the company, the larger this accounting loss turns out to be. A further $8.757 billion sits under other expenses.

The same pattern runs through the earlier years. The fair value change was $1.0 billion in 2023, $5.4 billion in 2024 and $34.3 billion in 2025, against reported net losses of $1.5 billion, $8.3 billion and $42.0 billion. Anyone betting on a falling price with the $80 billion argument is therefore betting against a number that grows along with a rising valuation.

What a pre-IPO perpetual is, and what it does not deliver

A perpetual future, or perp, is a futures contract with no expiry date. It tracks a reference price, and to keep it from drifting away from that price, buyers and sellers pay each other a balancing fee at short intervals, known as the funding rate. A pre-IPO perp tracks the estimated valuation of a company that is not yet listed on an exchange.

Nothing is delivered in the process. You receive no share, no voting right, no dividend and no claim should the company be taken over. You hold a position against other market participants, collateralised with a stablecoin pledge. If the price moves against you and the pledge no longer covers it, the position is closed by force.

Technically these markets run on Hyperliquid as builder markets: an operator sets up its own market and decides the reference price, the maximum leverage and the quotation unit itself. According to Cryptobriefing, one of the Anthropic contracts can also be reached through the MetaMask wallet app, which lowers the barrier for retail investors further.

MiCA or MiFID II: which rules a contract like this falls under

A perpetual on a company valuation is not a crypto asset within the meaning of the EU regulation MiCA. It is a derivative. In the European Union that puts it under the MiFID II rulebook, so the requirements for financial instruments apply instead of the obligations for crypto service providers. We have written up what this classification means for leveraged products in detail in our classification of perpetuals under the CFD rules.

In practice that means the operators of these builder markets hold no German licence, and they do not present themselves as investment firms either. There is no investment advice there, no appropriateness test and no deposit protection. A licensed house in Germany would have to meet every one of those points.

Four markets on the same company, three different prices

How many Anthropic markets exist on Hyperliquid and what they cost had not been compiled anywhere until now. The figures below rest on the publicly viewable market data from Hyperliquid; all 550 perpetual markets across the ten builder marketplaces and the main book were checked, as of Tuesday, 2.40pm German time. Cryptoticker.io gathered this survey itself on October 27, 2026.

Four of those 550 markets quote Anthropic, and they do it in three different units. The market with the ticker io:ANTH stood at 1,893.70 points, 0.22 percent above its level 24 hours earlier, with twelve-times leverage, open positions worth $54.06 million and daily turnover of $19.24 million. The market xyz:ANT was quoted at 115.57, 16.25 percent below the previous day, at ten-times leverage, with $7.41 million of open positions and $15.33 million of daily turnover.

The two remaining markets are all but empty. para:ANTH stood at 115.45 at ten-times leverage, vntl:ANTHROPIC at 1,619.30 at three-times leverage; in both, Tuesday afternoon brought next to no open positions and no turnover at all. Buy into an empty market and you pay whatever the single counterparty asks, and you barely get out again when the pressure comes.

That spread is the real finding. The high quotes follow a convention that several reports describe as one point standing for roughly $1 billion of implied company valuation. The low quotes appear to work in an estimated price per share. Comparing the numbers across two of these markets therefore makes no sense, and none of the four quotes is a share price. The easiest one to mistake is xyz:ANT, because ANT is precisely the ticker Anthropic has applied for to use on the real Nasdaq listing.

Tax: capital gains instead of a one-year holding period

With cryptocurrencies held directly, you know the one-year holding period after which a sale stays tax free. That rule cannot be carried over to futures contracts. As cryptoticker.io set out on October 12, 2026 in its analysis of the taxation of crypto futures and perps, these trades attract the German flat capital gains tax of 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge, and they do so from the first trade onwards.

Then there is loss offsetting, which follows its own rules for derivatives and cannot be set against other categories of income at will. A provider without a German licence withholds no tax and issues no annual statement. The filing therefore rests entirely with you. Which programmes capture these trades cleanly and produce a statement for the tax office is shown in our comparison of crypto tax tools; for larger positions, a trip to a tax adviser is the cheaper option.

How to check whether a provider is licensed in Germany

BaFin maintains a public company database listing every licence it has granted. For European houses, the supervisory authority ESMA keeps its own register of authorised providers. If you find a name in neither directory, that is not a sign of a gap in the database. It is the answer to your question.

Two further points are settled in a few minutes. If a platform asks for no identity check, it is not working to European anti-money-laundering rules. And if the terms and conditions name a place of jurisdiction outside the European Union, a dispute leaves you with no German court in which to sue for your money.

Twelve-times leverage, funding and liquidation: what the bet costs

Retail investors in Germany face a leverage cap of 2:1 on contracts for difference on crypto assets, together with a forced close once half the collateral has been consumed and protection against losing more than the money paid in. The Anthropic markets measured here offer six times that cap. At twelve-times leverage, an adverse move of a little over eight percent consumes the pledge, and a 16 percent daily move is what one of the four markets delivered on Tuesday.

The running costs, by contrast, are moderate and differ sharply. The funding rates measured work out to a charge of around 1.4 percent a year on a long position in io:ANTH, while xyz:ANT ran at around 0.3 percent a year even slightly in favour of buyers. In para:ANTH the rate stood at around 25 percent a year, which carries little meaning in a market without turnover. These rates are not fixed fees; they shift by the hour with the imbalance between buyers and sellers.

The pledge sits as a stablecoin on the platform, away from any German bank. That leaves you carrying the risk of the stablecoin, the risk of the platform and the risk of the individual market operator setting the reference price, on top of the price risk.

Key dates: price range, subscription and first day of trading

The next documented step is an amendment to the prospectus entering the price range and the number of shares. Only then is an order of magnitude fixed, and only after that does the subscription phase begin. CoinDesk puts the market's expectation at mid-November and, citing the television journalist Liz Claman, November 19 or 20 for the pricing. The company has named no date for the first day of trading.

Until then this holds: every number standing in a pre-IPO market is the opinion of those trading there about a price nobody yet knows. Investors in Germany who want to hold Anthropic shares in a portfolio after the listing need a broker with access to the Nasdaq, and no perp at all.

Anthropic IPO: the price range is still missing from the prospectus

1. Wait for the price range. While the share count and the range sit empty in the prospectus, there is no yardstick for a valuation. If you want to gather experience with open-ended futures contracts before then, look at the fees and leverage caps of the providers in the perp DEX comparison.
2. Settle your access to the share. For ANT after trading starts you need a portfolio account with a US venue. Which houses offer that and at what cost is shown by the broker comparison.
3. Look at the market, not just the price. Leverage, funding rate and open positions belong ahead of every order. Two of the four Anthropic markets were empty on Tuesday, and an empty market costs more than a bad price. Tools that display such metrics market by market are listed in the comparison of analytics platforms.

(As of October 27, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)