Here's How You Can Invest in Anthropic Even If You're Not a VC

Introduction

For someone sitting outside the US, getting direct access to American stocks can be challenging. Private companies are locked even tighter. For example, take a company like Anthropic. The company behind ClaudeAI is still private, so its shares are even harder for regular investors to get their hands on. 

But there is a pretty interesting workaround emerging in crypto. Hyperliquid now lets traders take a position on Anthropic’s implied valuation through a perpetual contract.

So, instead of buying an actual Anthropic share, you are basically betting on where the market thinks Anthropic’s valuation is going next. That means someone in India, Singapore, or another eligible market can potentially trade Anthropic exposure through an onchain market without actually owning a single share of Anthropic.

You Are Not Actually Buying Anthropic Stock

This is the first thing to understand before opening the trade. The Anthropic contract on Hyperliquid is a derivative. There are no Anthropic shares sitting behind your position, and owning the contract does not give you voting rights, dividends or an actual equity claim on the company.

Think of it more like trading BTC perpetuals. When you trade a BTC perp, you do not own Bitcoin just because your position moves with the price of Bitcoin. The same basic idea applies here.

With Anthropic's perp (denoted by ANTH), you are trading the market’s view of Anthropic’s valuation.

• Go long and you are betting that valuation rises.
• Go short and you are betting that it falls.

That might sound simple, but the fact that the underlying company is still private makes the whole thing much more interesting.

So How Does Hyperliquid Even Price Anthropic?

There is no Nasdaq ticker for Anthropic. There is no live stock chart updating every second and that creates a problem.

What exactly should the Hyperliquid contract track? The answer comes from the infrastructure built around Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework.

HIP-3 allows third-party builders to create their own perpetual markets on Hyperliquid. The builder handles things like the market design and price feed, while Hyperliquid provides the trading infrastructure, order book, margin system and settlement layer.

One of those teams, Entropy, has been running an Anthropic pre-IPO perp under the ANTH ticker since late August. Instead of showing a normal stock price, the contract is quoted around the company’s implied valuation. So if the contract trades around 2,000, that roughly corresponds to a $2 trillion valuation.

That number does not mean Anthropic has a $2,000 share price. It means traders are assigning an implied valuation of around $2 trillion to the company through this derivative market.

So How Do You Actually Trade Anthropic?

Now that you understand how it functions, here's a quick overview of how you actually go about it. Don't worry, it's pretty similar to placing crypto perp orders:

1. Connect a self-custody wallet

You first need a compatible crypto wallet and an account that can interact with Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid's standard onboarding uses a wallet connection and supports USDC deposits through Arbitrum.

2. Fund the account with USDC

USDC is used as collateral for the Anthropic perpetual. Once the funds are deposited into the Hyperliquid environment, they can be used for the HIP-3 market.

3. Open the Anthropic market

Entropy currently operates the io:ANTH market on Hyperliquid. From its interface, traders can select ANTH and choose whether to go long or short.

The contract currently uses isolated margin, and its leverage parameters can change as the market evolves, so the trading screen should always be treated as the final source for the current limit. Recent market data has shown leverage of up to 6x.

4. Choose your position

A long position means you expect Anthropic's implied valuation to rise. A short means you expect it to fall. The important thing is that your P&L comes from the movement in the derivative, not from owning an underlying Anthropic share.

Not just pre-IPOs, Trade U.S. Stocks Also

If pre-IPO stocks aren't your thing, or you simply don't have access to the U.S. stock market, you can still trade them on Hyperliquid.

E.g. take Tesla. Not only can you trade a Tesla perp (xyz: TSLA), but you can also do it on a Sunday evening, even though the traditional market remains closed. On a stock perpetual running on Hyperliquid, all these restrictions disappear.

A major Tesla headline can hit on Sunday morning, and traders don't necessarily have to wait until Monday morning to express a view. They can already position for it.

And just like with Anthropic, you still do not own Tesla stock. But you can trade the price exposure. That distinction might sound small, but it is actually the whole point.

The Interesting Part Is What Comes Next

For years, private-market investing was essentially a club with a very high entry fee. Venture capital firms, large institutions and selected accredited investors could get exposure to companies long before ordinary traders could.

Now, a crypto wallet can potentially give an eligible trader a way to express a view on the valuation of a company like Anthropic before it has a public ticker.

That does not democratize ownership of Anthropic. It democratizes access to a market opinion about Anthropic.

You won't own a single share, but Hyperliquid will let you trade Anthropic's valuation from almost anywhere with a wallet, even at 3 AM on a Sunday if that's your thing.

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