No exchange license, no market maker qualification, no endorsement from Wall Street. On-chain market, victory.

Written by: Conflux

In May 2026, an AI chip company called Cerebras officially listed on NASDAQ.

At the moment the market opened, the reference price given by the traditional pre-market platform Forge Global differed from the final opening price by 208%; another pre-market platform Hiive had a deviation of as much as 56%.

In another market—Hyperliquid on-chain, the Cerebras perpetual contract launched days earlier ultimately had a discrepancy of only 3% compared to the opening price.

No exchange license, no market maker qualification, no endorsement from Wall Street. On-chain market, victory.

A door that ordinary investors can never step through

In terms of IPOs, there exists an almost insurmountable wall between ordinary investors and institutions.

OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX—the most rapidly growing tech assets over the past decade have almost all emerged in the primary market. Silicon Valley VCs, major Wall Street firms, high-net-worth family offices entered when the companies were still valued in the tens of billions; but when ordinary investors finally have the chance to buy in, it is often on the IPO day—when valuations have already been pushed to hundreds of billions and the first wave of price increases has long been distributed.

The pre-market trading market should have been a compensatory mechanism, but its entry ticket is not open to everyone. Forge's threshold is an annual income of $200,000 or a net worth exceeding $1 million; Hiive has a similar institutional club setup. Most people cannot push open this door in their lifetime.

And Hyperliquid is changing this.

Former criticism becomes the biggest barrier

When Hyperliquid first launched, there were some voices in the crypto community: "This thing is too similar to traditional finance."

But the irony of history is: past criticism has now become the biggest barrier. As tokenized stocks, Pre-IPO contracts, and commodity trading began to emerge on-chain, the platform that first took on this demand was precisely the one that was "most like traditional finance."

Hyperliquid is a high-performance blockchain designed for derivatives trading, where all trading, matching, and clearing occur on-chain. In October last year, it launched HIP-3, allowing any qualified developer to independently deploy and operate a perpetual contract market, defining the underlying assets, selecting price oracles, and setting parameter rules.

Hyperliquid’s asset tokenization department, Hyperunit, built Trade.xyz on top of this—currently the largest third-party application in the HIP-3 ecosystem, capturing over 90% of the open contract volume and connecting the on-chain matching capacity to the most valuable off-chain assets: U.S. stocks, indices, commodities, and the opening Pre-IPO sector.

Within less than six months of its launch, Trade.xyz has seen a cumulative trading volume exceeding $110 billion, with a peak single-day trading volume of $5.6 billion and over 45,000 daily active trading addresses. Among its top 30 trading markets, only 7 are cryptocurrency trading pairs, with the rest coming from stocks, commodities, and indices.

This number hides a more significant structural change: Hyperliquid is using the logic of traditional financial markets to do what traditional finance cannot—round the clock, no threshold, bidirectional price discovery.

This is precisely the fundamental source of the 3% discrepancy with Cerebras, and also the fundamental source of the 208% and 56% deviations.

The problem with traditional pre-market is not technical, but structural. The structure of Forge and Hiive dictates that they can only be a mirror, not a market. Participants are all buyers wanting to "get in" and sellers wanting to "get out", pushing prices in only one direction; the frequency of updates is also very low, one relies on algorithms to output once a day, and another is driven by sporadic trades. Prices have no opportunity to be questioned, and naturally, no opportunity to be corrected.

The structure of Trade.xyz is entirely different: operating 24/7, updating prices every 3 seconds, and any sudden news is immediately reflected. On a Saturday in February this year, when the U.S. launched an airstrike against Iran and CME shut down, the daily trading volume of crude oil on Hyperliquid jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion—in such times, the on-chain market is the only continuously operating price discovery machine.

The contracts on Trade.xyz are purely perpetual synthetic assets, not involving real equity, and are cash-settled derivatives. This legal structure grants it flexibility far exceeding that of traditional pre-market platforms, as evidenced by the official authorization from S&P Dow Jones to use the S&P 500 index for Hyperliquid perpetual contract trading.

More crucially, it allows anyone globally holding USDC to participate, with no asset threshold, no geographic restrictions, supporting both long and short positions with up to 50 times leverage—Asian retail investors, European hedge funds, and high-leverage whales are competing in the same public market, any mispricing will be quickly corrected by arbitrage.

After the war with Cerebras, Bloomberg began quoting Hyperliquid's crude oil contract prices as "the most reference-worthy prices," and the on-chain pricing capability has started to enter the view of mainstream financial media.

SpaceX is about to ring the bell: Will Hyperliquid continue the legend?

Cerebras is the first case, but a greater test is coming.

SpaceX, which is about to go public on NASDAQ, has a target valuation of $1.75 trillion and aims to raise $75 billion—if completed, it will erase the historical IPO record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 of $29.4 billion in one fell swoop, becoming the largest stock issuance in human history. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are leading the underwriting.

Trade.xyz's pre-market contract for SpaceX is already live, and on-chain trading has pushed its market capitalization to over $2 trillion. Macro analyst Citrini commented on this figure: "Given how precisely the market valued Cerebras, Musk will undoubtedly become the world's first trillionaire."

This time, the conclusion has yet to be drawn. But the logic of the market is quietly changing: institutional investors and macro traders are beginning to treat Trade.xyz's prices as a reference benchmark for SpaceX's opening, just like they did for Cerebras. That pricing door, once only open to institutions, is beginning to be pried open little by little by the on-chain market.

Wall Street is starting to feel uneasy

When the scale reaches a certain point, a sense of threat arises.

According to data from DefiLlama, Hyperliquid's perpetual contract trading volume exceeded $171.9 billion in the past 30 days, reaching a historical peak of sharing more than 75% of the entire on-chain perpetual contract market. The two major traditional derivatives market infrastructures—CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange—are now uneasy.

In May of this year, two institutions pushed U.S. regulators to intensify scrutiny of Hyperliquid, citing potential market manipulation risks and possible sanctions evasion. The deeper concern is that platforms like Hyperliquid, expanding without a unified regulatory framework, could disrupt existing derivatives market structures and pose cross-border compliance challenges.

When a competitor is pressured by giants to regulators, it often means it has threatened the latter's core interests.

Jeff Yan visits Washington

Facing this pressure from traditional finance, Hyperliquid is not passively responding but has long been prepared.

As early as February this year, the Hyper Foundation allocated approximately $29 million to the independent nonprofit organization Hyperliquid Policy Center, specifically for policy research and regulatory lobbying, headed by former Blockchain Association policy chief Jake Chervinsky.

In May, the same week CME and ICE officially pressured, Hyperliquid co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan traveled to Washington for face-to-face talks with congressional members. The discussions revolved around the CLARITY Act and cryptocurrency regulatory framework, focusing on promoting the compliance of on-chain derivatives trading markets in the U.S.

The exchanges were twofold: one was a technical introduction concerning Hyperliquid's on-chain trading architecture, global user demand, and its positioning as a financial innovation infrastructure; the second was an explanation of the "first principles" of DeFi and on-chain markets, helping policymakers understand the relevant mechanisms and potential impact. Jeff Yan later stated that he sensed a "cautious yet open" regulatory attitude towards the crypto industry from both parties in the U.S. and believed that the current moment is a policy window for pushing on-chain derivatives into the U.S. regulatory framework.

The Policy Center simultaneously publicly responded to the accusations of the two exchanges: all trading records of Hyperliquid are traceable on-chain, with transparency far exceeding any traditional financial venue. This transparency is exactly the core motivation for Jeff Yan to leave traditional finance and build on-chain markets.

In his view, the issue with traditional financial systems has never been efficiency—but rather trust relies on intermediaries, and capital flows depend on the judgments of a few individuals, leaving ordinary people forever unable to see the whole picture. Blockchain provides a possibility for the first time: to replace trust with code, making all accounts public on-chain, and allowing anyone to verify in real time.

This battlefield of the game has already extended from the trading interface to Capitol Hill.

That door is opening to everyone

In the past, IPO pricing was a game that took place in a closed room—pricing books, roadshows, exclusive channels for institutions, with ordinary people forever waiting outside for the market to open.

Cerebras that time confronted 3% against 208%, proving for the first time with numbers that the door is not unpushable.

SpaceX is about to ring the bell. A larger verification window has already opened.