Entropy, an independent market deployer using Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, said on Aug. 25 that it had raised $14 million in a funding round led by Ribbit Capital and locked roughly $40 million worth of HYPE tokens as bonded margin. After the capital and staking backing were put in place, the company launched ANTH on Hyperliquid mainnet, a Pre-IPO perpetual contract tied to the equity valuation of AI unicorn Anthropic.
The move goes beyond the debut of a single product. It reflects a broader push to bring more traditional assets into on-chain derivatives markets, while testing whether private-market valuation exposure can be traded with fewer access barriers than in conventional finance.
Backers and team structure
Ribbit Capital led the round. As described in the source article, the firm’s portfolio spans both fintech and crypto, including investments in Coinbase, Morpho, Arbitrum and Lighter, along with an exit tied to Stripe’s acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge. In that context, its investment in Entropy is framed as a bet on the migration of traditional assets into on-chain derivatives.
Entropy’s team combines traditional market-making and crypto-native experience. Core members on the technology and trading side come from Citadel Securities, Optiver and Millennium, bringing background in cross-asset high-frequency pricing, order-book microstructure and market-making risk controls. Business and operations hires include people from decentralized prediction market Polymarket, with experience in bootstrapping on-chain liquidity and structuring event-driven derivatives.
That mix targets a basic challenge in tokenized or synthetic exposure to traditional assets: the need to understand both conventional pricing logic and risk systems, and the mechanics of on-chain markets and user behavior.
How Entropy is handling pricing and funding
Attempts to list on-chain stock products and Pre-IPO contracts are not new, but they have repeatedly run into three structural problems identified in the article: lagging oracle data, shallow order books and funding rates that become unreasonable when the underlying market is closed. Entropy’s design focuses on those areas.
Liquidity-weighted oracle
For Pre-IPO contracts tied to private companies such as Anthropic, there is no live spot market in the usual sense. Entropy’s answer is a liquidity-weighted oracle that blends external private-market benchmark data with internal order-book pricing. The external leg pulls from transaction data and financing valuations across multiple private secondary market platforms. The internal leg uses the midpoint of Entropy’s own order book, with smoothing applied.
The weighting shifts according to two-sided depth in the book. If on-chain depth is strong, more weight goes to internal pricing and on-chain trading has greater influence over price discovery. If liquidity is thin, external valuation references carry more weight. The system also keeps a floor under the outside data: even when internal depth is strong, external sources retain at least a 5% weighting as a valuation anchor.
For listed equities such as Sandisk, the system uses session-based pricing. During U.S. stock market hours, the oracle relies 100% on public market real-time prices, while the mark price is set as a three-minute moving average of the public price and the on-chain midpoint. Outside market hours, the system switches to a liquidity-weighted mode that combines after-hours prices with real-time on-chain depth.
Time-segmented funding rates
Funding rates in perpetual futures are meant to keep contract prices aligned with spot markets. In practice, when an underlying stock or index is not trading, on-chain prices can move on headlines while traders still face steep overnight funding costs. The article describes this as one of the main pain points in on-chain derivatives.
Entropy’s approach is a damping mechanism based on trading hours. During market hours, stock and index perpetuals use a funding-rate multiplier equal to 0.5x Hyperliquid’s standard value. When the underlying market is closed, that multiplier falls to 0.125x. For Pre-IPO perpetuals, where private-market data is sparse and difficult to force-anchor with aggressive funding, the multiplier is fixed at 0.00125.
On fees, Entropy uses the standard HIP-3 revenue split, with the protocol and deployer each taking 50%. To accelerate early activity, the initial markets have entered what the article calls a “growth mode,” cutting base trading fees by 90% to attract market makers and early traders.
Why Anthropic was chosen first
Entropy picked Anthropic as its launch product to target a familiar bottleneck in private markets: high access thresholds and weak liquidity in Pre-IPO trading.
Citing The New York Times, the article says Anthropic is planning to raise more than $100 billion in its IPO and is targeting a valuation of as much as $2 trillion. ANTH was trading at $2,005 on Entropy at the time referenced in the report, implying a valuation of $2.005 trillion. Under Entropy’s pricing rules, every $1 in the market price of a Pre-IPO perpetual corresponds to $1 billion in the company’s valuation.
In conventional private markets, retail participation is usually blocked by accredited-investor rules, minimum ticket sizes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, review periods that can last months for rights of first refusal, and strict transfer lockups. Traders also tend to have only one-way long exposure, with limited ability to hedge valuation swings.
Entropy’s ANTH contract is presented as an on-chain route around those restrictions:
- Open access: any on-chain address can participate, allowing fractional exposure.
- 24/7 trading: the market runs continuously, without being tied to U.S. stock market hours.
- Two-way positioning: native leveraged long and short trading allows users to express upside views or hedge existing private-market exposure.
- Pure price exposure: the contract does not grant voting rights, dividend rights or other legal claims tied to real equity. If the company lists, the product would convert into a standard stock perpetual.
The proposition is not to create a new underlying asset, but to turn a hard-to-access and illiquid private-market exposure into something that can trade continuously on-chain at lower cost.
Commercial, pricing and regulatory risks remain
Even with market attention building around Entropy, the report lays out several risks that could shape the outcome.
Ventuals offers a recent warning
The clearest comparison comes from Ventuals, another Hyperliquid ecosystem project focused on Pre-IPO perpetuals. It had secured staking support of more than 500,000 HYPE and recorded $650 million in historical trading volume, but shut down in June after what the article described as a strategic business adjustment. Its markets were liquidated and removed.
That example suggests that large staking commitments and an early burst of volume do not automatically produce a durable business model. The article also notes that Trade.xyz holds a dominant position in HIP-3 markets, putting pressure on rivals such as Ventuals. In a winner-takes-most structure, newer deployers may face lower returns and longer payback periods. HIP-3 staking can discipline misconduct, but it cannot stop a deployer from closing markets because of competition, weak liquidity or strategic shifts.
Mapped exposure has built-in limits
There is also a structural issue with pricing. ANTH and similar Pre-IPO perpetuals are not backed by real equity ownership. If private-market valuations diverge or an IPO timeline slips, the on-chain contract can move far away from what the primary market would imply. Under thin liquidity, short-term flows and leverage can amplify those dislocations and turn the market into a pure trading chip rather than a clean reflection of valuation.
Regulatory pressure is an overhang
The longest-lasting uncertainty is regulation. The article says unlicensed derivatives tied to U.S. stocks and Pre-IPO assets remain under strict scrutiny from agencies including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That leaves all such projects exposed to potential compliance actions.
A test case for broader on-chain traditional asset markets
For Entropy, ANTH is an early test rather than a finished model. The larger question is whether its framework can move beyond one high-profile AI name and scale across a wider set of traditional assets, while keeping enough liquidity and economic sustainability through changing market cycles.
For traders, the article points to three issues that still matter before taking part: liquidity depth, funding-rate behavior and the operating risk of the deployer itself. On-chain derivatives may be moving from crypto into commodities, equities and private-market valuation exposure, but there is still a long distance between making an asset tradable and building a mature, reliable and sustainable market around it.