Traders Bet Big on Non-Existent Stock

Crypto traders have been pricing a non-existent stock at $2 trillion. On September 9, Defillama's pre-IPO dashboard showed Binance's ANTHROPIC/USDT contract trading at $2,120, implying an implied company value of roughly $2.12 trillion under the exchange's assumed share count of 1 billion.

Similar contracts on other exchanges like Bitget, Kraken, BingX, Aster, and Coinbase International were trading in the same price range, with some even reaching above $2 trillion before settling back down to around $1.97 trillion.

The catch is that none of these contracts are actual Anthropic stock. Binance listed ANTHROPIC/USDT on June 2 as a USDT-margined perpetual contract with up to 20 times leverage, which settles in tether and uses a market price created by trading on the exchange, not a public share price.

Anthropic has warned that unauthorized investment structures may be worthless, including special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) that claim economic exposure through tokenized securities. The company has stated that transfers into an SPV are void and that third parties selling exposure through tokenized securities or similar mechanisms may be offering investments with no value.

Despite the lack of actual stock behind these contracts, traders have been speculating on Anthropic's future value, which has climbed from $380 billion in February to $965 billion in May. Bankers and investors have discussed a possible listing in the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range, but for now, anyone reading ANTHROPIC/USDT as a true equity price is playing with fire.