Author: David, Shenchao TechFlow

In recent days, both Chinese and English CT have been buzzing about the same US stock code, $CBRS.

Some say "the feeling of being pushed is too strong," while others say "finally experiencing the advantages of on-chain." An IPO of an AI chip company has made crypto players experience FOMO.

Cerebras is Nvidia's most direct competitor in the AI chip field, with clients including OpenAI and Amazon.

It went public on Nasdaq on May 14, priced at $185 with subscriptions oversubscribed by 20 times, and underwriters even raised the price range twice. After opening, the price jumped directly to $350, peaking at $386 during trading, and closing at $311, with an increase of nearly 90% at one point.

According to CNBC, this is the largest tech IPO in the US since Uber in 2019, raising a total of $5.55 billion.

However, the excitement for crypto players is not about how much this stock itself rose. Some of them had already participated in the price game of CBRS through the Pre-IPO perpetual contracts launched on Trade.xyz via Hyperliquid two weeks before the US stock market opened.

According to Hyperliquid News statistics, the Pre-IPO contracts for $CBRS broke all records before its listing, with a trading volume of $127 million and an open interest of $66 million.

A few hours before the IPO, BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom fund manager Arthur Hayes posted on X, saying he looked at the on-chain quotes for CBRS on Hyperliquid and estimated the opening at around $277. In the end, the actual opening was $350, 26% higher than the on-chain figure. The direction was correct, but the magnitude was underestimated.

The on-chain quotes were 50% higher than the IPO pricing, although they did not fully reflect the frenzy for AI chips. However, one trend has become vaguely apparent, namely, relying on Hyperliquid, on-chain contract quotes are being treated as leading indicators for US stock IPOs, which was unimaginable in the past.

On-chain Pre-IPO, Pre-market Price Discovery

When many people see the three words "Pre-IPO," their first reaction is to think of new stock subscriptions.

But it has nothing to do with new stock subscriptions in the US stock market.

According to Trade.xyz's official documentation, the Pre-IPO perpetual contract (IPOP) is a cash-settled derivative contract that does not represent shares, does not provide IPO allocation, and does not constitute any form of tokenized equity. There are no ownership rights, no voting rights, and no dividends. This indicates that the bet is on the price direction of a company after it goes public, and nothing more.

The pricing mechanism is also different from regular perpetual contracts. Before listing, there are no external oracles to feed prices; the contract adopts market-driven pricing from within Hyperliquid, with prices entirely determined by traders' buy and sell actions, and the funding rate calculated based on the previous day's mark price's exponentially weighted moving average.

In simple terms, there is no "correct price"; it's whatever the market thinks it's worth.

This is also why there was such a large difference between the $277 Arthur Hayes saw and the actual opening price of $350. On-chain traders set a price, but they have no roadshow materials, do not know the institutional subscription multiples, and cannot see the underwriters' bookkeeping data. On-chain pricing relies on sentiment and speculation, not information.

Once the company completes its IPO and there is sufficient external market data, the Pre-IPO contracts will automatically convert to regular stock perpetual contracts, connecting to genuine stock price oracles, with positions remaining unchanged, requiring no closing and reopening.

For those accustomed to on-chain trading, the operational threshold is almost zero. With a wallet, USDC, and access to Hyperliquid, one can open positions. Trade.xyz, as the largest HIP-3 deployer in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, has already obtained official authorization from S&P Dow Jones in March this year to launch S&P 500 perpetual contracts. The Pre-IPO product is its latest step, with CBRS as the first test case.

According to Trade.xyz's risk statement, the mark price may experience jumps when the contract transitions from Pre-IPO to ordinary perpetual, and if the position is close to the maintenance margin line, this jump can directly trigger liquidation. Moreover, since liquidity before the IPO is limited, large orders can experience significant slippage.

So this is definitely not a new stock subscription; it's a bet on a stock that has not yet been listed, in a venue that does not have price limits, circuit breakers, and operates 24 hours. The advantage is that the venue is always open, and the downside is that the venue is always open.

A New Catalyst for HYPE?

The buzz around the Pre-IPO contracts for CBRS is lively, but focusing solely on this one product may underestimate the scale of what is happening. Over the past week, Hyperliquid has seen a series of positive developments, with CBRS being just the most standout one.

On May 12, the asset management company 21Shares launched THYP on Nasdaq, the first HYPE spot ETF in the US market. According to Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart's statistics, the first day's trading volume was $1.8 million, with a net inflow of $1.2 million, and a management fee of 0.3%, the lowest among similar products.

Two days later, on May 14, the same day CBRS listed on Nasdaq, Coinbase announced that it had become the official USDC treasury deployer for Hyperliquid, directly managing on-chain stablecoin liquidity, and acquiring the USDH brand assets from the original Native Market on Hyperliquid.

Currently, the USDC supply on Hyperliquid has reached about $5 billion, doubling year-on-year. On the same day, Circle announced it would expand its role in Hyperliquid's USDC infrastructure and added 500,000 HYPE in staking, moving toward validator nodes. HashKey Exchange in Hong Kong also launched HYPE over-the-counter trading on the same day.

(Reference Reading: How Hyperliquid pries open Circle's treasure chest with channel taxation?)

Hyperliquid has previously been seen primarily as a leading player in on-chain perpetual contracts, quick on new coins, and aggressive whale trades, but in essence, it is still a crypto trading venue.

The changes this week point in another direction: traditional funds have gained access through ETFs, stablecoin infrastructure has been taken over by legitimate players like Coinbase, and the types of tradable assets have expanded from crypto assets to traditional stocks. When combined, these factors seem to signal a change in identity.

Returning to HYPE itself.

This token's story over the past year and a half has been "the best on-chain perpetual contract exchange." This narrative holds true, as Hyperliquid has indeed captured over half of the on-chain derivatives market share, and according to DeFiLlama data, it has incurred over $56 million in monthly fees, with more than 95% used to repurchase and burn HYPE, making it a top-tier cash flow machine in the DeFi world.

After $CBRS, some of its positioning may change.

If you explain Hyperliquid to someone, a phrase like “it's the place where you can trade two weeks before a US stock IPO” might have stronger outreach capability than purely crypto narratives.

The contract quotes of an on-chain protocol are gradually beginning to influence the core pricing mechanisms of traditional finance; regardless of liquidity and actual trading volumes, this has indeed happened.

I believe this is significant for HYPE as it now possesses something it previously lacked: a story that does not need five minutes of explanation to be understood by outsiders.

In the crypto market, such items are often undervalued in terms of scarcity.

Think back to each cycle; the tokens that rose the most usually had a narrative core that could be explained in a single sentence. The Pre-IPO contracts have given HYPE such a core, and currently, it is the only one that has it.

However, Hyperliquid's biggest hurdle now is blocking US users, making this platform temporarily inaccessible to the world's largest capital market. Nevertheless, opening the world's hottest asset category of US stocks to non-US users through on-chain perpetual contracts is an ecological niche in itself.

The question of "how much the rest of the world wants to touch US stocks" can be gauged by the level of FOMO on CT in recent days.

There may still be opportunities to repeatedly validate this narrative logic in the future.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all announced IPO plans this year. If their Pre-IPO contracts also appear on Hyperliquid, each time that could retell this story. Of course, this is “if.”