(Bloomberg) — The race to sell retail investors a piece of the AI boom has gone mainstream — closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles. Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth — ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access.
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The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX — in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage.
Ventuals and PreStocks, two crypto venues riding that shift, have seen their trading activity — measured by open interest and market value combined — surge more than threefold since the start of the year to last month. Major crypto exchanges have also begun listing pre-IPO assets, broadening the reach of these instruments to tens of millions of users. Trade.xyz, a crypto derivatives platform on the Hyperliquid blockchain, is also joining in.
Traders have pushed the implied valuation of Anthropic alone to $1.6 trillion across Ventuals and PreStocks, double what investors assigned the company in its most recent funding round.
The figures reflect speculative positioning, not transactions in actual equity.
None of it confers real ownership, and the two platforms work differently. Traders on Ventuals, which is backed by investment firm Paradigm, are speculating on valuations via perpetual futures — derivatives with no asset backing, no expiration date, and no anchor to any actual share transaction. PreStocks takes a different approach: its tokens are minted one-to-one against SPV exposure intended to track real shares on secondary markets. That gives holders a stake in a vehicle that purports to hold the underlying equity, though Anthropic has explicitly warned those structures may carry no legal value and that the company treats them as void.
Those SPVs are sourced through a network of funds and brokers, said Xavier Ekkel, founder at PreStocks. “SPVs already represent the majority of traditional pre-IPO secondary volume, including for top private-company names; PreStocks builds on top of that existing structure while bringing real-time price discovery to a historically opaque market,” he said.
Ventuals has accumulated about $500 million in trading volume since launching in November, while PreStocks’ aggregate trading volume stands at over $630 million since September, according to Artemis Analytics.
AI labs, rocket companies and robotics startups dominate headlines, but retail investors currently have few ways to get exposure, said Alvin Hsia, co-founder of Ventuals. “Ventuals matches the public’s interest in transformative technology with real, tradable markets,” he added.
Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The platforms are among the latest examples of crypto infrastructure being repurposed for real-world assets — a trend that has accelerated sharply this year as the technology matures beyond its origins in digital tokens. Tokenized Treasury funds, money-market instruments and private-credit vehicles have drawn capital from investors onto blockchain rails. These pre-IPO derivatives represent the latest retail frontier of that shift: the same permissionless architecture that once powered memecoin speculation is being used to ride the likes of Anthropic in real time.
Jesse Leimgruber, co-founder at AI hardware-maker OpenHome, says he checks Ventuals to get a handle on what his Anthropic shares are worth. In April, he posted on X about receiving an offer for his Anthropic shares. The offer came through traditional secondary market channels but the price was in the same territory as Ventuals’ implied valuation, suggesting the onchain derivatives market is tracking real institutional demand, not just speculative noise.
Luke Cannon, who trades on Ventuals, said the platform gave him access to more flexible trades. “I’ve traded in the private markets before but the options are pretty one-sided, long-only and generally with a multi-year time horizon looking toward IPO,” he said.
Anthropic is currently the most popular stock across Ventuals and PreStocks, with twice the “tokenized interest” of rival OpenAI, according to the Artemis data. That echoes the picture in wider secondary markets, where OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor as investors pivot to Anthropic.
Cannon said he shorted OpenAI and Anthropic shares on Ventuals after they reached $1 trillion valuations, citing fading narratives.
Anthropic recently said Google would invest $10 billion in the company at a $350 billion valuation, while other investors have offered the company cash at an $800 billion valuation. Demand for exposure to the startup and its rivals is “astonishing across the board, from retail to funds,” said Andrew Van Aken, stablecoin lead at Artemis.
Previous attempts to carve out access to equity in these businesses through digital-asset technology have stoked pushback. Last year, Robinhood Markets Inc. shares fell after OpenAI cast doubt on the brokerage’s offer of equity tokens tied to the company led by Sam Altman. OpenAI had neither collaborated on nor endorsed the offering, it said in a statement at the time.
(Adds comment from Ventuals user in 20th paragraph.)
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