Everything can be "contractual": Pre-IPO on-chain experiment revelations

Written by: ODIG

How many types of assets are being traded on the chain?

Most of them are crypto-native tokens, stablecoins, etc. This year, many rapidly growing RWAs (real-world assets) have been added, such as bonds, stocks, gold, and so on.

Innovation continues: Recently, the leading decentralized exchange Hyperliquid launched perpetual contracts for the artificial intelligence unicorn OpenAI.

Yes, based on the Hyperliquid HIP-3 infrastructure, the decentralized derivatives platform Ventuals has deployed perpetual contracts for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The platform offers 3x leverage, and the open interest cap has been increased from $1 million to $3 million.

(*Hyperliquid allows builders to stake 500,000 HYPE to deploy custom perpetuals through the HIP-3 framework. It uses an economic margin and a validator supervision mechanism to prevent oracle manipulation through staking penalties, while providing deployers with up to 50% fee sharing to ensure security and incentivize third-party innovation. Ventuals can be seen as a sub-project based on HIP-3.)

This token can be regarded as the “perpetual contract” of pre-IPO assets.

This definition is highly imaginative. In traditional financial markets, Pre-IPO equity trading is subject to strict regulation and is extremely limited. By combining Pre-IPO with perpetual contracts, it does not involve actual equity delivery, but instead engages in “contractual valuation games,” allowing assets that originally lack liquidity to “come into existence,” thereby creating a larger market space.

A good performance is: after going live, the trading activity of the contract shows a slight increase, with both trading volume and price fluctuating within a certain range, reflecting a certain demand in the market for Pre-IPO asset trading.

(ventuals.com)

However, early low-liquidity markets still face numerous challenges: Are the oracles stable? Is the risk control mechanism reliable? These are all key prerequisites for their continued development.

Regardless, this year the PerpDEX track has significantly accelerated, and Pre-IPO Token has the potential to reshape the on-chain derivatives landscape.

Jeff, the founder of Hyperliquid, anticipates that the perpetual contract market for “any asset” will present a billion-dollar market opportunity as finance fully transitions to blockchain and mobile applications designed for non-crypto users are developed.

How to view “contractual” Pre-IPO Token?

Core: The authenticity and credibility of price data

As part of the RWA asset spectrum, its feasibility depends on the standardization of the underlying assets. Pre-IPO assets have a reliable source of pricing to a certain extent. How to continuously, stably, and verifiably provide prices for Pre-IPO assets that are closer to their true valuations requires rigorous observation of the oracle mechanism (a third-party service tool used to obtain, verify external information, and transmit it to smart contracts running on the blockchain), which is also key to the sustainability of the entire sector.

Policy arbitrage space

The regulatory environment remains ambiguous. The U.S. CFTC's innovation exemption provides a regulatory sandbox for innovative derivatives; the EU MiCA mainly focuses on spot trading; there is still some room for innovation in perpetual contracts.

Hyperliquid provides liquidity to non-listed assets through the contract-based, non-physical delivery method offered by HIP-3, which can be seen as an on-chain alternative for “restricted trading”.

The innovation brought by native cryptocurrency

The on-chain contract speculation valuation brought by Pre-IPO Tokens can to some extent reflect retail investors' views on the valuation of private companies, thereby creating a broader impact.

If the market continues to develop, there is potential to form a “shadow market for restricted trading assets.” This is a new market brought about by the Web3 technological revolution.

PerpDEX track competition accelerates

From the perspective of the Perp DEX track, in order to compete for market share and liquidity, DEX is also continuously exploring new, high-growth trading targets to attract more users.

In the early data, the trading volume of Pre-IPO assets such as OpenAI is relatively limited, and the main impact is still concentrated in the realm of innovative experiments. However, if RWA-type perpetual contracts continue to be introduced, it may allow liquidity to be redistributed between crypto assets and traditional assets.

The wave of perpetual contractization of all things

2025 is a turbulent year. On one hand, the crypto market is in a period of intensive events and is very volatile; on the other hand, RWA is on the rise, and RWA + perpetual contracts are also rapidly evolving.

This is a comprehensive trend of “perpetual contractization” from crypto assets to traditional financial instruments: prior to this, the public chain Injective made strides in the field of tokenized stock perpetual contracts, with a cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion through its Helix DEX by the first half of 2025, offering leverage of up to 25 times.

Although the current trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts is relatively limited, it is clear that the decentralized infrastructure has the capability to support complex financial products, laying a technical and community foundation for the future on-chain of larger-scale traditional assets.

This innovation will compel traditional financial institutions to seriously consider how to leverage blockchain technology to reduce transaction costs, improve efficiency, and ultimately potentially drive the tokenization of RWA and the development of on-chain derivatives.