Everything can be "contractualized": Pre-IPO on-chain experimentation revelations

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

Most are crypto-native tokens, stablecoins, etc. This year has seen a significant increase in high-growth RWAs (real-world assets) such as bonds, stocks, gold, and more.

And innovation continues: Recently, the leading decentralized exchange Hyperliquid launched the perpetual contract for the AI 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 raised from $1 million to $3 million.

This token can be seen as the “perpetual contract” of Pre-IPO assets.

This definition is highly imaginative. In traditional financial markets, Pre-IPO equity trading is strictly regulated and extremely limited. Combining Pre-IPO with perpetual contracts does not involve real equity delivery; instead, it engages in a “contractual game of valuation,” allowing originally illiquid assets to “come into existence” and, on the contrary, possess a greater 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.

However, early low-liquidity markets still face many challenges: Are the oracles stable? Are the risk control mechanisms reliable? These are key prerequisites for their ongoing development.

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

Jeff, the founder of Hyperliquid, predicts the perpetual contract market for “any asset” as follows: “With the full on-chain transition of finance, mobile applications designed for non-crypto users will create a billion-dollar market opportunity.”

How to view “contractual” Pre-IPO Token?

Core: The Authenticity and Credibility of Price Data

As part of the RWA asset scope, its feasibility depends on the degree of standardization of the underlying assets. Pre-IPO assets have a reliable price source to some extent. How to continuously, stably, and verifiably provide a price for Pre-IPO assets that is closer to the true valuation 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) and is also key to the sustainability of the entire track.

Policy Arbitrage Space

The regulatory environment remains unclear. The US 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 “contractual, 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 speculation valuation brought by Pre-IPO Token on-chain contracts can to some extent reflect retail investors' views on the valuation of private companies, thereby having a broader impact.

If the market continues to develop, there is potential to form a “shadow market for restricted trading targets.” 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 constantly 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 remains focused on the level of innovative experimentation. However, if RWA perpetual contracts continue to be introduced, it could potentially allow liquidity to be redistributed between crypto assets and traditional assets.

“The wave of universal perpetual contracts”

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 trend of “comprehensive 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 dollars through its Helix DEX by the first half of 2025, able to provide leverage up to 25 times.

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

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