On June 15, 2026, Ventuals posted a brief yet meaningful announcement on its official website: starting from that day, the platform and related operations will gradually shut down. This decision was personally defined by the team as the end of its "all-weather private equity market" experimental phase. In the same announcement, Ventuals confirmed that the existing HIP-3/pre-IPO market—including perpetual contracts tied to unlisted tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic—will sequentially enter the settlement process in the coming days, and after the last transaction is completed, it will be completely shut down. The contrast is that just before this curtain call, the statistics reported by multiple media outlets still looked respectable: Ventuals had cumulatively raised over 500,000 HYPE tokens in this niche segment, and according to a single source, its platform's cumulative trading volume was approximately $650 million. In the emerging field of pre-IPO on-chain derivatives, this was once a well-regarded sample. However, the next step given in the announcement was not "upgrade iteration," but "integration": the Ventuals team will no longer operate as an independent project, but will instead join another construction team in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, transforming from a standalone platform into a component within a leading decentralized derivatives ecosystem. Why would a project that had achieved financing and trading volume in the pre-IPO private RWA perpetual sector choose to shut down its license and merge into a larger ecosystem at what seemed to be a rising moment? This pivot raises the core question of whether it exposes the structural limitations of the "all-weather private equity market" model itself, or signifies that the integration logic of DeFi in real-world assets is being rewritten.
From Pre-IPO Rookie to Active Shutdown
To understand this pivot, we must first return to the time when Ventuals was seen as a "rookie." From the beginning, it did not position itself as a generic derivatives platform but instead focused on the risk exposure prior to IPOs of unlisted tech companies: its core product allowed users to trade the price expectations of these private tech companies through on-chain contracts before they actually hit the public market. Names like OpenAI and Anthropic were bundled into the HIP-3/pre-IPO market on the platform, creating a typical RWA (real-world assets) perpetual contract DEX narrative—using the familiar DeFi tool of perpetual contracts to connect with the most inaccessible corners of traditional private equity.
Under this narrative, "all-weather private equity market" became Ventuals' signature self-definition. The team attempted to convince the market that equity in early-stage tech companies, once belonging only to a few institutions and high-net-worth individuals, could be broken down into 7×24 hours of globally accessible on-chain risk exposure. Anyone familiar with wallets and contracts could submit their price assessments for these companies that might IPO in the future, even on weekends or late at night. This story had, at one point, considerable numerical backing—multiple media outlets reported that Ventuals had raised over 500,000 HYPE tokens before the shutdown; according to a single source, its platform's cumulative trading volume was around $650 million. In this nascent niche of pre-IPO on-chain derivatives, these figures were sufficient to be interpreted as signals of a successful operation. Thus, when this seemingly ascendant "pre-IPO rookie" chose to press the shutdown button, the outside world first felt the abrupt gap between narrative and reality.
The Ideal vs. Reality Collision of All-Weather Pre-IPO Trading
The gap first manifested in the underlying assets themselves. Ventuals envisioned an "all-weather private equity market" that split high-barrier private equity exposure, accessible only to a few institutions, into perpetual contracts tradeable by any on-chain user. However, pre-IPO equity lacks a publicly transparent secondary market price; the only sources for contract pricing left are offline valuation reports, the terms of the most recent financing round, and fragmented secondary gray market quotes. This information is either outdated or sourced from disparate and unstable channels. When it is solidified into an on-chain perpetual price curve, the platform has to bear not only the responsibility of "quoting prices" but also the ensuing risk management pressure—when the valuation narrative of the real world suddenly changes, it is challenging to determine which anchor point the contract price should follow using a simple formula.
The regulatory uncertainty further squeezed the imagination. Different jurisdictions have inconsistent requirements for private equity, accredited investors, and tokenized securities, yet Ventuals attempted to provide risk exposure for these assets in a decentralized interface aimed at global users. The result was that, even though the platform had accumulated about $650 million in trading volume (from a single source) before shutting down, proving that people were willing to pay for this pre-IPO exposure, under the premise that pricing, information disclosure, and compliance boundaries were unresolved, such figures were difficult to consider as "ironclad evidence" that the business model had worked. By defining the shutdown in the announcement as "the end of the experimental phase," Ventuals seemed to acknowledge that under the current structural constraints, this attempt had circled the boundaries of feasibility; rather than being a failure of Ventuals' operations, it was more about the fact that the RWA pre-IPO perpetual contract track was not yet mature enough to support the long-term operations of an independent platform.
Turning Towards Hyperliquid: The Destination Choice for Vertical Projects
When Ventuals announced the "end of the experimental phase" in the announcement, multiple media outlets cited official information to add that the team would no longer operate as an independent project but would merge into another construction team within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. What is shutting down is the brand, not the people or the code; this pivot essentially integrates a pre-IPO structure that has already gone through real trading but is difficult to shoulder the uncertainties of liquidity and compliance on its own, into a toolbox of a leading derivatives ecosystem. From the external brand "Ventuals" to a specific component within Hyperliquid, the role has changed: it no longer needs to independently attract new users or build pools, but serves as a functional piece of the ecosystem, seeking new integration points on existing infrastructure and user networks.
Hyperliquid itself is already one of the main ecosystems in the current decentralized derivatives field, having established a community and incentive system around the HYPE token. Since Ventuals' previous fundraising was priced in HYPE, it effectively tied its capital structure to this main line early on. Now that the team has officially "turned towards Hyperliquid," it signifies that this originally somewhat ambiguous association has been institutionalized: the high-uncertainty RWA perpetual product of pre-IPO has been inserted into a more active transaction environment with more mature risk control and contract infrastructure, exchanging for potential liquidity spillover, technical reuse, and brand endorsement. In the larger DeFi narrative, this is also a familiar trajectory—under the multiple pressures of dispersed liquidity, high risk control and security costs, and unclear regulatory pathways for RWA, many vertically segmented products ultimately have to give up being "a nation unto themselves" and instead rely on leading ecosystems to continue their experiments as "ecosystem components." Ventuals' story is thus transitioning from the success or failure of an isolated track project to a high-risk innovative experiment within a leading derivatives ecosystem.
Finale of the HIP-3 Market: Contracts for OpenAI and Others Going to Settlement
Returning from the grand narrative of "ecosystem components" to the trading interface, the way Ventuals offered to conclude was through a concentrated clearance. The announcement published on June 15 stated directly: the existing HIP-3/pre-IPO market on the platform, including contracts targeting OpenAI and Anthropic, would gradually enter the settlement process and be settled and cease trading in the coming days. For all users still present, this means that prices that could originally be contested 7×24 hours will be compressed into a final bidding war in a very short time, and all long and short positions will be settled or realized according to the platform's existing rules. In comparison, the announcement did not provide publicly verifiable details on how the settlement prices would be determined, whether pricing methods like TWAP would be used, or when the "final hammer" would be struck, repeatedly reminding users to "pay attention to the settlement process." This somewhat acknowledges the sensitivity of this step regarding experience and trust.
From the user's perspective, this concentrated settlement of pre-IPO contracts itself acts as an amplifier for liquidity, pricing, and counterparty risk: in the final few days before the settlement window, those wishing to exit early will squeeze liquidity against each other in an increasingly thin order book, bearing larger spreads and slippage; those choosing to hold their positions until the end will expose themselves to a settlement mechanism that is not completely transparent regarding information, while betting on the platform's credibility for price matching and fund settlement. For RWA perpetual and pre-IPO products still in the early exploratory stage, how to design and implement the rules for this moment is not just a "technical detail," but a key variable determining whether the entire experiment can be seen as a replicable solution by the market. Whether participants can understand these rules and assess platform risk beforehand will directly determine whether they are willing to entrust real-world risks to a perpetual contract on-chain for the long term.
What’s Next for the Pre-IPO Track After Ventuals' Exit
From the grand debut of the "pre-IPO private market RWA perpetual contract DEX," accumulating over 500,000 HYPE tokens and around $650 million in trading volume, to actively shutting down on June 15, 2026, and announcing the end of the "all-weather private equity market" experiment, with the HIP-3/pre-IPO market settling and liquidating in a few days, Ventuals has completed a typical "early narrative—scale experiment—path contraction" closed loop. The team was then integrated into Hyperliquid, a leading derivatives ecosystem, changing its role from an independent trading venue to a functional component within a large system. This does not mean that the "all-weather private equity market" model is completely denied; rather, it marks the conclusion of the phase of attempting to carry this proposition on an independent platform. It is more likely that such pre-IPO exposures will continue to evolve within top ecosystems in the form of embedded modules, dedicated areas, or product lines. For the pre-IPO RWA perpetual track, Ventuals’ exit is merely a node in the trial-and-error cycle, and the signals worth watching going forward are how regulatory frameworks define the boundaries of on-chain pre-IPO contracts, whether the underlying data and pricing infrastructure can reduce the discount resulting from information opacity, and how much effort and organization ecosystems like Hyperliquid will take to continue integrating and iterating such vertical products. These variables will collectively determine whether the next batch of "all-weather private equity markets" will break out independently again or remain long concealed within the internal structure of a large derivatives system.
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