Crypto traders paid 8,700% annualized fees to bet on Anthropic
Crypto traders paid annualized fees of 8,700% to service a leveraged, synthetic bet on the valuation of Anthropic.
Even as the privately-held AI giant neared a $1 trillion valuation, some paid 1% per hour, imputing an expected Anthropic rally to $88 trillion within a year, just to cover the cost of their leveraged long.
For context, the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world today, Nvidia, has a market capitalization of $5.2 trillion.
Worse, the market they selected doesn’t actually deliver real Anthropic shares.
A combination of arcane terminology and abbreviations, off-page terms of service, a small open interest cap, and a simplified interface for trading compressed those disturbing realities into an easy-to-click “Buy” button alongside a flickering price chart.
Normally, short-sellers pay their brokers for the privilege of loaning out shares to sell first, with the hopes of buying back cheaper later.
In the topsy-turvy world of crypto, buying long exposure to Anthropic was even more expensive than shorting over the weekend.
Paying 8,700% annualized fees to bet on Anthropic
Because Anthropic isn’t publicly traded, crypto exchange Hyperliquid lists a USDH-denominated contract using the Ventuals deployer on $7.5 million worth of Anthropic open interest partially based on Notice’s estimate of Anthropic’s valuation.
If you didn’t understand the above sentence, you haven’t read the full terms of service for ANTHROPIC on Hyperliquid and are probably no different than many traders who bought it anyway.
USDH calls itself a stablecoin, even though it’s traded between $0.72 and $1.11 over the past year.
In addition, Notice doesn’t actually know the real-time value of Anthropic.
Moreover, the whole artifice relies on two proprietary altcoins plus innumerable service provider risks.
Despite these stratospheric risks, traders paid up to 1% per hour to use 3x leverage on Anthropic’s private valuation.
For most of the past two days, the contract traded well above the Notice oracle’s reference price, forcing longs to pay hourly funding rates to shorts. Those payouts briefly made shorting one of the most-hyped AI companies a de facto, high-yield income strategy.
Don’t worry, funding is capped at 4% per hour
Incredibly, Hyperliquid settles funding rates hourly and caps them not at 1% but at 4% per hour.
On Hyperliquid’s ANTHROPIC, the hourly rate exceeded 1.5% over the weekend, equivalent to annualized fees in the five-digit percentages.
Across a 48-hour period this weekend, longs paid shorts over 15% of their position size in funding alone. That isn’t a typo. A $10,000 long with no Anthropic valuation movement at all would have bled $1,500 to the short side within two days.
Disclosures explaining these losses exist on off-webpage disclosures. In essence, the gap between the contract’s mark price and Notice’s oracle reference drives the funding rates on Ventuals contracts on Hyperliquid.
On the ANTHROPIC Ventuals contract, Notice’s oracle sat near $934 while Hyperliquid Ventuals traders paid over $1,060.
Each unit on Ventuals represents $1 billion of valuation, so those numbers translate to a $934 billion oracle-implied valuation relative to a $1.06 trillion Hyperliquid exponential moving average or “mark” valuation.
That 13.6% premium of mark over oracle, which varied by the hour, is what generated the lavish payouts to anyone willing to short Anthropic.
Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried’s $500M stake in AI startup ‘irrelevant’, prosecutors say
Fake shares in a real Anthropic
In February 2026, Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G led by GIC and Coatue at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Annualized revenue then increased from $9 billion at year-end 2025 to $30 billion by April.
Forge Global’s CEO Kelly Rodriques told Business Insider that secondaries had pushed the implied price near $1 trillion within three months.
Bloomberg and the Financial Times have since reported that a fresh round near $900 billion is being lined up with Dragoneer, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed.
Notice is a private-market data vendor. Its algorithm folds private-market trade prints, bids and offers, fresh funding announcements, valuation marks of funds, appraisals, and a peer basket of listed companies, all into a single number.
Notice publishes its number with a three-second refresh.
Ventuals on Hyperliquid also discloses its lack of equity transference directly. “When you have a position in a company on Ventuals, you do not have any underlying economic ownership in the company – you’re merely speculating on its valuation change.”
Its documentation reiterates, traders “trade valuations, not shares.”
Although Anthropic funding rates on Hyperliquid annualized in the four- and even five-digit percentages over the weekend, they’ve settled down to triple- and double-digit rates as of publication time.
As funding rates fluctuate by the hour, no Anthropic shares ever need to change hands for bearish traders to be paid by exuberant bulls.
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