Trading in Pre-IPO Companies Is Suddenly Big Business. Here's Why Hyperliquid Could Be the Biggest Winner.

A company you've probably never heard of -- ChangXin Memory Technologies -- priced its soon-to-launch stock listing this week in Shanghai at 8.66 yuan a share, valuing China's biggest memory chipmaker at almost $85 billion. Nearly two weeks before those shares are set for an initial public offering (IPO), a contract tracking one of them is changing hands on Hyperliquid (CRYPTO: HYPE), a decentralized derivatives exchange. Retail investors in China and practically everywhere else are scrambling to get exposure using its network.

Pre-IPO perpetual futures -- contracts that track a private company's expected share price and never expire -- are quickly becoming more popular. Cerebras Systems and Space Exploration Technologies each had perputal futures trading before listing, and the next set of hotly anticipated IPOs, specifically OpenAI and Anthropic, have them now. Hyperliquid is currently positioned to be the biggest platform for trading those pre-IPO perpetuals, and here's why.

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The market that's more accurate than the investment banks

First, recognize that Hyperliquid didn't build these pre-IPO perpetual futures contract markets itself. Since October 2025, an upgrade to its network called HIP-3 has let anyone deploy perpetual futures markets using its order book for nearly any asset. One deployer, Trade.xyz, has focused on pre-IPOs.

Cerebras listed on Nasdaq in May after underwriters priced the offering at $185 a share. In the final hour before the bell, Hyperliquid's contract averaged $354.54, and the stock opened at $350. Similarly, SpaceX went out at $135 in June while the Hyperliquid contract implied the actual price was in the $160s, and then it subsequently closed day one at $161. The people who price new stock offerings for a living were not close to picking the initial market price of those shares (partly by design), but Hyperliquid's 24/7 markets were.

Distributing access to exposure to these pre-IPO names is a big draw for Hyperliquid. Getting a piece of SpaceX beforehand meant that investors needed to participate in an allocation lottery, whereas buying the pre-IPO perpetual futures for SpaceX didn't.

But there's an important wrinkle here. The pre-IPO contracts offered on Hyperliquid are financial derivatives, and they don't confer any ownership rights to the underlying shares of the asset. They're purely instruments for speculating on the price that the shares will cost after their launch.

Hyperliquid is the obvious winner of this trend

Hyperliquid is going to continue capturing a lot of capital and traffic thanks to its HIP-3 capabilities, which enable the creation of its pre-IPO futures markets.

After staking 500,000 HYPE coins, worth about $33 million at today's prices, developers keep up to half the transaction fees their markets generate. The rest goes to the network's Assistance Fund, which converts the fees into HYPE, and then burns the coins to reduce the circulating supply and reward holders. Builder markets charge roughly double the native rates, so Hyperliquid's take is about the same either way.

There was around $1.4 billion of cumulative volume across Hyperliquid's pre-IPO markets through early June, against $290 billion in cumulative volume across all of its builder-deployed markets. So, while the pre-IPO segment is small in comparison to Hyperliquid's total volume, it's a distinctive way to onboard new users. After those pre-IPO stocks have their offering, they continue to trade on Hyperliquid as normal perpetuals, so it isn't as though they stop contributing to the volume or the burning of fees.

The ChangXin Memory Technologies pre-IPO listing is likely to be one of those onboarding events. Although Hyperliquid's terms bar U.S. investors, the exchange can be used in China and elsewhere. That's how a Shanghai-based stock offering that few foreigners can buy became a Hyperliquid market for investors around the globe.

On July 15, open interest across Hyperliquid's builder-deployed markets stood at roughly $3.6 billion. Volume has been climbing steadily since their launch, and it currently holds 67% of the decentralized perpetuals market.

Given that positioning, the chain is likely to continue leading the market. The relationship between activity on the network and coin burns that reduce the circulating supply makes it an appealing investment at the moment.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Hyperliquid. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.