On September 9, Binance's pre-IPO perpetual contract for Anthropic traded above $2,100, producing an implied company valuation exceeding $2.1 trillion when multiplied by Binance's estimated one-billion-share denominator.
A DefiLlama snapshot at 14:45 UTC that day recorded the contract at $2,168.26, with $26.1 million in open interest and $24.76 million in 24-hour trading volume. A later snapshot showed the mark at $2,122.74, with open interest up 6.1% over 24 hours and approximately $243,000 in liquidations. The contract briefly produced an implied value near $2 trillion in August and closed August 31 near $1.9 trillion.
Context for the Valuation
Anthropic disclosed in May that its Series H funding round raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation. Binance Research noted that the current contract price implies roughly double the May financing valuation and approximately 30 times Anthropic's stated revenue run rate of $47 billion.
Binance's contract specifies an estimated one billion shares, though the exchange's official announcement notes that the actual total may differ and warns that Binance does not endorse the resulting implied value.
Market Structure and Limitations
Binance permits up to 20x leverage on the ANTHROPICUSDT contract, with funding occurring every eight hours at a rate of 0.005% per interval. The contract's price is shaped by Binance's participants, collateral rules, and liquidity rather than by an equity market, since no public Anthropic share index exists.
The pre-IPO contract does not represent ownership in Anthropic and is not sponsored or endorsed by the company. As a result, the market can diverge significantly from private-market valuations or eventual IPO pricing, particularly during periods of thin trading.
Potential Price Anchors
Anthropic disclosed on June 1 that it had confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, noting that the number of shares to be offered and the offer price had not yet been set. Reports from September 4 indicated that marketing was expected to begin in mid-October at the earliest, with a public prospectus expected in late September, though Anthropic declined to comment on the timeline.
Binance has stated it may rescale the contract's estimated share denominator and transition the instrument to a standard perpetual once a stable third-party index becomes available following a public listing. Until public filings and an eventual IPO supply offer terms and an external reference price, the contract's implied valuation remains a product of Binance's own market structure, leverage rules, and denominator estimate.
