NEAR Protocol launches confidential pre-IPO futures for Anthropic, listing ANT on near.com

The decentralized platform has introduced perpetual futures trading on Anthropic shares, designated under the ticker ANT, on the near.com platform, supported by the Hyperliquid blockchain.

Traders can access leverage up to 10x, and the position structure remains concealed from public observation. Privacy of these trades is highlighted as the primary characteristic of this release.

This contract launch represents speculative activity preceding the conventional market debut. The blockchain facility enables market participants to wager on the company's worth before traditional exchange brokers gain access.

The catalyst for this trading was the release of Anthropic's official Form S-1 prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This filing provided concrete figures for asset valuation ahead of the Nasdaq listing.

The document detailed that the company's revenue expanded from $41 million in 2023 to $4.6 billion in 2025, reaching $16.3 billion during the first half of the current year. In Q2 2026, Anthropic reported an operating profit for the first time, alongside a net accounting loss of $80.7 billion for that six-month period due to depreciation obligations.

Computing power rental and purchase expenses over the preceding five months totaled $417 billion. Considering the last private funding round valued the company at $965 billion (approximately 49 times annual revenue), this new on-chain instrument serves as the initial venue for testing the firm's valuation.

Currently, the ANT contract price hovers around $115. The commencement of trading exposed technical liquidity fragmentation across different pools. The base contract on Trade.xyz quotes $115.47 with a daily volume of $9.1 million, while another pool shows a price of $1,891.0 and leads in volume at $13.6 million, a discrepancy attributed to differing lot size specifications between the index tracking contract and the single-asset quote from the Trade.xyz engine.

This development illustrates how decentralized protocols are integrating advanced financial instruments to allow early market assessment of major institutional listings, affecting how market participants and institutions approach pre-IPO capital formation.

Why it matters

This launch represents an early, speculative market test of a major tech company's valuation before a traditional Nasdaq listing. For DeFi participants, this highlights the increasing intersection of on-chain derivatives and traditional finance events. Watch how this pre-market sentiment influences the eventual public market debut.