NEAR Protocol Launches Confidential Pre-IPO Futures for AI Giant Anthropic

The decentralized platform NEAR Protocol has announced the start of trading in perpetual futures on shares of AI startup Anthropic. The instrument under the ticker ANT has been launched on the near.com platform with technical assistance on the Hyperliquid blockchain. Traders are offered leverage of up to 10x and a position structure hidden from public monitoring.

The launch of this contract is pure speculation ahead of the classic market. The blockchain platform allows traders to bet on the company's value before traditional exchange brokers are let near it. Privacy of trades is declared as the key feature of the release.

Financial Parameters

The main fuel for this trading was the publication of Anthropic's official prospectus on Form S-1 for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The document disclosed the financial parameters of the creator of the Claude neural network ahead of its listing on Nasdaq, giving speculators real figures for valuing the asset.

The filing revealed that the company's revenue grew from $41 million in 2023 to $4.6 billion in 2025, and in the first half of the current year reached $16.3 billion. In Q2 2026, Anthropic showed an operating profit for the first time, while recording a net accounting loss of $80.7 billion for the six months due to depreciation obligations.

Costs of renting and purchasing computing power over the last five months amounted to $417 billion. Since the last private funding round took place at a valuation of $965 billion (about 49 times annual revenue), the new on-chain instrument has effectively become the first venue for market testing of the company's value.

Price Fragmentation

At the moment, the price of the ANT contract has stabilized around $115. However, the start of trading revealed technical fragmentation of liquidity between pools. The base contract on the Trade.xyz platform holds quotes at $115.47 with a daily trading volume of $9.1 million. The alternative pool leads in volume with $13.6 million, but shows a price of $1,891.0.

The gap is due to the batch specification of the lot size, where one contract tracks an index of several stocks, while the Trade.xyz engine quotes the value of a single asset. Representatives of the platform remind traders that ANT futures are high-risk, cash-settled instruments that do not give the right to actual Anthropic shares, and are not available to U.S. residents due to regulatory restrictions.