329 Traders Prop Up Anthropic’s $1.2 Trillion "Valuation," AI Anxiety Finally Gets a Price

Original Author: Sleepy

Yesterday, I came across an article with the title: "The New Global AI King is Born! Anthropic's Valuation Soars to $1.2 Trillion, Surpassing OpenAI for the First Time."

This title perfectly captures the spirit of our times. It has AI, an underdog story, a new king crowned, and a number so large it defies imagination. It’s like a gong. When it sounds, it’s hard not to look up.

Where did this $1.2 trillion valuation come from? It actually originates from the on-chain Pre-IPO market.

The so-called on-chain Pre-IPO market doesn't trade the common stock you see in a securities account. It's more like a designed "pre-IPO exposure." Through tokenization, SPV, or synthetic structures, someone slices the future listing expectations of a private company into small pieces and facilitates trades on-chain. It opens a window previously difficult for ordinary investors to access and provides a real-time price for the market. Anthropic was priced at $1.2 trillion in this market.

Over the past two years, AI has often felt to the average person less like "I’m participating in a new era" and more like "the new era just passed me by." Nvidia went up, cloud providers went up, large model companies went through round after round of funding. But the real core equity remained mostly locked up in the private market. We could see the ship, but couldn't get a ticket. So, any ticket that might lead to companies like OpenAI or Anthropic automatically gets a halo effect.

But in moments like these, it's even more necessary to take the number out of the headline, put it on the table, and see how it was actually derived. Anthropic might be one of the AI companies most worthy of serious study right now. However, the issue is that a good company, a great era, and an aggressive price cannot automatically merge into the same thing.

On the crypto trading platform Jupiter, Anthropic's Pre-IPO token saw a daily trading volume of only $1.39 million, with just 329 traders in the past 24 hours. And it’s precisely this $1.39 million and 329 traders that cast a trillion-dollar illusion.

But I don't want to discuss whether Anthropic is worth the money or whether trading Pre-IPO assets on-chain is problematic. I want to first clarify a more fundamental question: What conditions must a price meet to qualify as a "valuation"?

The Birth Certificate of a Price

In February 2026, Anthropic completed its Series G funding round. It raised $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion, led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and hedge fund Coatue Management. A month later, OpenAI announced it had completed its latest funding round of $122 billion, at a valuation of $852 billion, with major investors including SoftBank, Microsoft, and other institutional investors.

How were these two sets of numbers generated?

Take Anthropic's Series G round as an example. GIC is a sovereign wealth fund managing over $700 billion, and Coatue is a global tech hedge fund managing over $60 billion. They each have dozens-strong due diligence teams that spent months analyzing Anthropic's technical architecture, revenue curve, customer retention, and competitive landscape. The final $30 billion investment came with a full set of legal terms, including anti-dilution protection, liquidation preferences, information rights, and board observer seats. If Anthropic underperforms or trends downward, these clauses ensure GIC and Coatue can recoup their principal first.

They didn't just buy a number; they bought a complete set of legally enforceable rights.

And the $1.2 trillion on Jupiter? Three hundred-odd traders, a few million dollars in daily volume, and a token with no promises or obligations from Anthropic. What you buy isn't a small piece of the company; it's just an on-chain betting receipt.

Both prices appear identically in news headlines, both called "valuation XX billion."

In 1985, financial economist Albert Kyle published his seminal paper "Continuous Auctions and Insider Trading," introducing the concept of "market depth" measured by λ, which gauges the price impact of a unit of capital inflow. In a deep market, a $100 million buy might cause only a 0.1% price fluctuation; in a shallow market, $50,000 can move the price by 20%. The larger the λ, the greater the price impact of a single trade, and the thinner the consensus information carried by the price itself.

Anthropic on Jupiter has a liquidity pool depth of around $1 million supporting an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion. The ratio of liquidity to valuation is roughly 1:1,200,000. If someone wanted to sell a $10 million position at the $1.2 trillion valuation in this market, they would drain the entire liquidity pool ten times over. This price is unexecutable; it exists only on paper, un-cashable in the real world.

If it were merely used as a reference indicator for observation, that would be fine. The problem is it wasn't treated that way. It became the basis for the argument "officially surpassing OpenAI," the headline for the "birth of a new global king," and cognitive input for countless readers.

Packaging the marginal price of a thin market as broad consensus didn't start today. It's been happening for nearly four hundred years.

The Tavern in Haarlem

February 3, 1637. Haarlem, Netherlands.

In a small tavern, about thirty people sat around a long table. Following the custom in Amsterdam and Haarlem at the time, these informal tulip bidding gatherings were held several times a week, usually in the tavern's back room. Participants were merchants and flower brokers from the circle who knew each other well.

That day's lot was a Semper Augustus bulb. Its red and white petals were considered a masterpiece of creation, with only about a dozen known to exist in all of the Netherlands. Bidding lasted an evening, finally closing at 10,000 Dutch guilders.

In 1637 Amsterdam, a canal-side townhouse cost about 5,000 guilders, and a skilled craftsman's annual income was about 300 guilders. One bulb was worth two mansions, or 33 years of a craftsman's wages.

And this price was born from just thirty people, in a closed space, fueled by alcohol, with no external constraints, market maker obligations, or information disclosure requirements. Bidders whipped up each other's emotions and bore no obligation other than paying for their bids.

The next day, the transaction price was recorded in pamphlets printed in Haarlem. The pamphlets reached Leiden, Rotterdam, and Utrecht via postal services. Farmers and small merchants who read them had no way of knowing how the number was generated. To them, the price in print equated to the market price. Some began hoarding common varieties, believing the entire market would rise.

On February 6, at a tulip auction in Alkmaar, bidding suddenly stopped. Then Haarlem, then Amsterdam. Within a day, buy orders across the Netherlands vanished. Those who had hoarded bulbs based on the market price found no takers. Prices crashed, dropping over 90% within a week.

In hindsight, the "10,000 guilder" Semper Augustus wasn't the judgment of a market, but of a single room. Yet, amplified by the printing press, the room's judgment became a national perception.

Eighty-three years later, 1720, London.

South Sea Company stock climbed from £128 at the start of the year to £1,050 in June. Founded in 1711, this trading company held a monopoly on British trade with South America, but actual trade profits were meager. The real driver of the stock surge was a complex debt-to-equity swap. The company proposed taking over government debt, converting it into company stock, and then sustaining the cycle by continuously inflating the stock price.

Newton sold his South Sea shares at £300, netting a £7,000 profit. But the price kept climbing. In July, Newton bought back in at the peak. After the crash that autumn, his total loss reached £20,000, roughly ten years' salary as Master of the Royal Mint.

Newton probably never thought deeply about how that "£1,050" he referenced was produced.

In 1720, there were no electronic trading systems or central counterparty clearing. Buying or selling South Sea shares required personally visiting the company's London office to transfer ownership or finding a broker in one of the coffee houses of Exchange Alley. Actual daily transactions might have been dozens to a few hundred, involving maybe a hundred direct counterparties.

These prices were recorded on price sheets at Jonathan's Coffee House. When newspapers reprinted these sheets, they didn't add footnotes like "12 trades today, total value ~£8,000." Readers across all of England saw only the number "South Sea Company: £1,050."

When the panic selling started in late July, the price born from the limited game of a hundred people was instantly shattered. No market maker was obligated to buy. No circuit breakers. No central bank intervention. By December, the stock fell back to £124, almost back to where it started the year.

Jump forward two hundred and sixty years. Tokyo in the late 1980s.

"The land value of the Japanese Imperial Palace exceeds that of the entire state of California." This claim was widely cited by global media in 1989. Based on estimates at the time, the total value of the 2.3 square kilometer palace grounds, extrapolated from surrounding land prices, was about $850 billion, while the assessed total value of all land in California was about $500 billion. But this extrapolation only referenced the unit price of a handful of actual transactions in the Ginza and Marunouchi areas.

Japan's land market had a unique structural characteristic: extremely low turnover. Japanese landowners viewed real estate as a family asset to be passed down through generations, not traded for arbitrage. At the peak of the bubble in 1989, the total number of annual land transactions in Tokyo's central business district was very limited. Occasionally, plots entered the market due to owner bankruptcy or family inheritance disputes, leading a large pool of well-capitalized, eager buyers to compete for extremely scarce supply.

Prices generated under this extreme supply-demand imbalance were extrapolated by real estate appraisal agencies as the "fair value" for all land in the area. Their logic: if this small plot is worth 20 million yen per square meter, every adjacent plot must be worth the same.

In 1990, the Bank of Japan raised interest rates consecutively, and banks tightened lending standards. When companies were forced to sell real estate to repay loans, the true liquidity test began. Sell orders flooded in, while buy orders were thin. Actual liquidation prices were 50% to 80% lower than the so-called market valuations.

Japan's national land price index subsequently fell for a full 26 consecutive years, only seeing its first modest recovery in 2016.

The tavern in Haarlem, the coffeehouse in London, the real estate appraisal office in Tokyo, the Jupiter DEX on Solana. Four scenes spanning nearly four hundred years, sharing the same narrative structure:

A handful of participants generate an extreme price in an extremely thin market → Media disseminates it as broad consensus → The wider public makes decisions based on it → When liquidity is truly tested, prices revert.

The media evolved—pamphlets, newspapers, telegraphs, television, WeChat public accounts—but the core flaw never got fixed: when a price is transmitted, the conditions of its birth are systematically omitted.

Why?

Complex Stories Are Always Compressed into a Number Easy to Spread

Business journalism has an inherent problem: the real world is too complex, and the window for dissemination is too short.

Explaining what actually happened to a company often requires detailing its funding structure, product progress, revenue quality, competitive landscape, equity rights, exit paths, and market sentiment. But headlines have one line, and a reader's attention span is just seconds. So expressions like "valuation breaks a hundred billion," "market cap evaporates a trillion," "unicorn is born," "super platform rises" become an easily chosen form of compression. It's the narrow gate complex business information must pass through when entering public discourse.

Writers are, of course, also inside this gate. We all know explaining the birth conditions of a valuation is much harder than writing a headline with impact. The former requires patience, space, and a reader's willingness to linger; the latter just needs a bright enough number for people to instantly know "something happened here." If a headline read, "Anthropic's On-Chain Pre-IPO Synthetic Asset's Marginal Price in Low-Volume Market Extrapolates to $1.2 Trillion Implied Valuation," it might be more accurate, but it would probably exhaust its communicative power before reaching the reader.

Writing it as "The New Global AI King is Born" changes everything. It has drama, winners and losers, a throne, and the eternal human fascination with power transitions. Dissemination isn't a conveyor belt for facts; it's more like a juicer. You put the facts in, and out comes emotion.

The second reason is market structure. The Chinese business information environment lacks a key player: short sellers.

In the US capital markets, a high price detached from fundamentals doesn't stay safe for long. The business model of short-selling research firms like Muddy Waters, Citron Research, and Hindenburg Research is to identify targets where the price far exceeds what liquidity or fundamentals can support, release public reports, and profit by shorting.

They have a strong economic incentive to show the public the birth conditions of a number. Muddy Waters' 2020 report shorting Luckin Coffee was 89 pages long, employing 92 full-time and 1,418 part-time investigators, recording over 11,000 hours of store footage at 981 stores nationwide, and meticulously cross-referencing 25,843 receipts. All this work was to prove one thing: Luckin's reported per-store daily sales volume was fake; the real number was roughly half.

This level of adversarial research requires two preconditions. First, a short-selling mechanism exists to profit from "price reversion." Second, legal protection prevents short-selling reports from being suppressed. Both exist in the US stock market. In mainland China's A-share market and primary markets, neither essentially exists.

The result: no one can make money by questioning valuations, so no one has the incentive to ask under what conditions the price was generated.

Short sellers aren't destroyers. They are a corrective mechanism in the pricing system. The consequence of removing the corrective mechanism is that price deviations can expand continuously without resistance until they collapse under their own weight one day. And every day before that collapse, the market looks normal.

The consequences of these two forces combined are not lacking in Chinese business history.

In June 2015, shares of Leshi Internet (LeEco) peaked on the Shenzhen ChiNext board, giving it a market cap of about 170 billion RMB. Jia Yueting's depiction of the LeEco ecosystem—spanning phones, TVs, cars, sports, and film—with its concept of "chemical reactions" among seven sub-ecosystems, led investors to believe the synergy shouldn't be valued on a sum-of-parts basis but on exponential growth of the entire ecosystem.

No one asked about the capital behind this 170 billion yuan market cap. While Leshi's average daily trading volume in 2015 wasn't low, over 70% of the shares were locked up. The actual float was much smaller than the total market cap suggested. Tradable retail and small institutional investors pushed up the price based on limited supply, and this price was automatically multiplied by the total shares to get "170 billion."

A large number is produced → It enters the rankings → Provides a sense of certainty → No one has the incentive or ability to question it → A larger number is produced.

From this perspective, Anthropic's "$1.2 trillion" isn't an accident, just an output of a system functioning normally.

Anxiety, Anxiety

Let's look at that $1.2 trillion from a different angle.

What kind of person buys a synthetic token with no legal guarantees at an implied valuation three times higher than the latest institutional round in a market with a liquidity pool of just over a million dollars?

The answer is someone whose FOMO is strong enough to pay an anxiety premium.

When Anthropic's Series G round closed in February 2026, the valuation was $380 billion. Two months later, the implied valuation of the token on Jupiter was over three times that number.

Is this 3x premium due to an information advantage? Do the traders on Jupiter understand Anthropic's business better than GIC's due diligence team? Obviously not. This premium isn't buying a difference in knowledge; it's buying a psychological insurance policy hedging against the fear of "missing out."

If you were someone active in the crypto space in 2025-2026, what did you witness? Anthropic's annualized revenue surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by May 2026, tripling in three months. Its growth rate and absolute numbers dwarfed most crypto projects. Claude Code's