- Traders paid annualized fees as high as 8,700% to take leveraged long positions on Anthropic’s private valuation.
- The synthetic contract on crypto exchange Hyperliquid does not deliver real shares, merely speculating on valuation change.
- At peak rates, longs were effectively paying shorts over 1% per hour, with funding capped at a potential 4% hourly.
- The contract’s price premium over the Notice oracle reference generated these extreme funding payments.
Over the weekend, cryptocurrency traders on the Hyperliquid exchange paid staggering annualized fees of up to 8,700% to bet on the soaring valuation of private AI giant Anthropic. This frenzy centered on a leveraged synthetic contract that does not confer actual equity ownership.
Some participants paid over 1% per hour in funding fees, implying they expected Anthropic’s valuation to rally to an implausible $88 trillion within a year just to cover costs. For context, the world’s most valuable public company, NVIDIA, is currently valued at $5.2 trillion.
Consequently, short-sellers were paid lavish hourly rates by overly optimistic longs. This made shorting one of the most-hyped AI companies a de facto, high-yield income strategy during the period.
The contract is a USDH-denominated listing using the Ventuals deployer, based partially on Notice’s valuation estimate. However, Notice does not know the real-time value of Anthropic and the entire structure relies on multiple proprietary altcoins.
Hyperliquid settles these funding rates hourly, capping them at a potential 4% per hour. Across a 48-hour period, longs paid shorts over 15% of their position value in funding fees alone.
Meanwhile, the contract traded at a premium to the oracle reference price. This gap between the $1.06 trillion mark price and the $934 billion oracle price generated the extreme funding rates.
Ventuals discloses directly that traders “trade valuations, not shares.” Its documentation states that holding a position confers no underlying economic ownership in the company.
Anthropic itself is a real company, having closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion valuation in February 2026. Secondary market activity has since pushed its implied valuation toward $1 trillion.
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