IOSG: The First Real-World Test of Three Perpetual Mechanisms on SpaceX’s Listing Day

Original Author: Mario Chow

Original Source: IOSG Ventures

TL;DR

1. Why are Pre-IPO perpetuals important? They pry open two doors that were previously closed to almost everyone: first, placing directional bets on private companies like SpaceX and OpenAI *before their IPOs*, and second, getting a real-time price during nights, weekends, and pre-market hours when stock exchanges are closed but news continues to move prices. Now, anyone with a wallet can place these bets, continuously, without permission, just in time for the largest wave of IPOs in history.
2. Without a public spot price, how does the market price something? This is the core challenge for the entire asset class. With no external price to copy (which sometimes takes months), exchanges can only use what they have – their own order books – to generate a price, and only move it when real money is willing to trade away from it: moving slowly and expensively enough to be unfakeable. trade.xyz uses an internal oracle with a price range, while Ventuals partially relies on primary market data. Surprisingly, it works: the perpetual predicted Cerebras' opening price within 1.3%, and even priced oil over a weekend when traditional venues went dark.
3. What worked in the SpaceX case? trade.xyz captured the on-chain market (~96.5% of volume), not because its oracle was smarter, but because near-zero funding fees made holding the position virtually costless, it launched *riding* the IPO catalyst, and its per-share pricing enabled cross-exchange arbitrage. On listing day, June 12, the transition from synthetic perpetual to tracking spot was clean: no oracle gap, no liquidation cascade. The perp tracked the Nasdaq real-time price within 1% (approx. $152 vs. $150 execution price); its pre-market mark price also aligned closely with Nasdaq's indicative opening price (~$175), with the final execution clearing at the lower $150.
4. What unresolved risks remain? This asset class excels at handling prices but remains primitive at handling events. Corporate actions, especially post-conversion stock splits, have no pipeline on-chain: trade.xyz hasn't published any rebase mechanism, and Ventuals outsources this to a single data provider, which has already failed (an outdated split adjustment caused its market to flash crash 45%). The bottleneck isn't price discovery, but the boring 'corporate action' processing layer: traditional markets took a century to standardize it, but on-chain, no one has rebuilt it yet. Whoever can reliably deliver it closes the last gap between these markets and the ones they aim to replace.

Background: The Two Locked Doors Crypto Just Kicked Open

Pre-IPO perpetuals sit at the intersection of two things that, until very recently, were closed to almost everyone. Now, crypto's rails have pried both open.

The First Door: Pre-IPO Exposure, Finally Open to Retail

Pre-IPO shares of SpaceX or OpenAI were previously only accessible to accredited investors, VCs, and a handful of secondary desks, with opaque valuations only reset during funding rounds. Pre-IPO perpetuals tear down this wall. Anyone with a wallet can bet on where a private company's valuation is heading, anytime, without permission, and without touching any shares, quotas, or voting rights. The timing is impeccable, coinciding with the largest wave of IPOs in history. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12 at ~$1.77T valuation, with OpenAI and Anthropic expected to follow. For the first time, retail can position themselves before the opening bell, rather than chasing the price post-listing.

The Second Door: After-Hours Trading, Now Colonized by Crypto

Traditional exchanges still operate on 'banker's hours.' Stocks and futures stop trading at night, on weekends, and holidays. News breaks after hours, leaving real risk exposure unhedged. Crypto never closes. This time gap hands over the entire after-hours window to crypto, with most price discovery happening on Hyperliquid.

A key premise of this report: that after-hours quote isn't a guess; it often lands exactly where the real market reopens. One Saturday, Middle East conflict pushed oil prices higher, and only Hyperliquid was trading; when CME crude oil futures reopened Sunday evening, the price was exactly what Hyperliquid perpetuals had already found. TD Securities estimated that this platform had already priced in about 80% of the recent oil price swing before traditional exchanges opened. Same for stocks: trade.xyz's Cerebras perpetual deviated from Nasdaq's final opening price by only ~1.3%. During after-hours, the perpetual contract *is* the market.

How Early Are We? About 1% of TradFi Perpetual Volume

CoinDesk data shows how nascent this market is. On Binance and similar platforms, TradFi perpetuals are dominated by commodities and stocks. Pre-IPO is just a thin sliver on top of the stacked chart, accounting for a bit over 1% of total TradFi perpetual volume since launching around May 21.

On Binance, Pre-IPO volume is also highly concentrated in specific assets: SpaceX ~79%, OpenAI ~11%, Anthropic ~9%. This category launched around May 20, and Binance quickly captured over 60% of the share. Pre-IPO on CEXs is still in its infancy, with SpaceX as the star. The truly interesting action is on-chain.

SPCX Landscape Across Venues: Binance Leads, Hyperliquid Dominates On-Chain

Market Snapshot on June 10

Focusing on SpaceX itself, it *is* the Pre-IPO market right now. In this snapshot from June 10, total 24-hour volume for SPCX perpetuals across all venues was ~$323M. Binance led with $166M (51%), Hyperliquid held second with $69M (21%), followed by OKX with $61M (19%), then MEXC and a handful of smaller venues.

On-Chain Landscape: A Market with One Builder

Comparing Trade.xyz vs. Ventuals by the Numbers: 96.5% to 3.5%

Trade.xyz cumulative volume is ~$658M, with SPCX at $552M and its second asset QNT at $106M, all concentrated in about three weeks. Ventuals cumulative volume is ~$152M, spread more evenly across SPACEX ($53M), OPENAI ($43M), and ANTHROPIC ($56M), over about seven months.

Placing them on the same timeline shows the gap clearly. In the overlapping window after SPCX's launch, trade.xyz accounted for ~96.5% of on-chain Pre-IPO volume, corroborated by third-party trackers estimating it at '~95% of the Hyperliquid Pre-IPO basket.' Ventuals lists more assets, including the currently only online Anthropic and OpenAI contracts, but captures only a tiny fraction of flow. Listing isn't a moat; liquidity is.

HIP-3: The Platform Layer Underpinning It All

HIP-3 is an upgrade to Hyperliquid, transforming it from a single perpetual venue into a platform for builders to deploy perpetual DEXes. Any team staking 500,000 HYPE tokens can deploy their own perpetual market on Hyperliquid's matching engine layer, HyperCore. The builder controls listings, oracles, leverage limits, and contract parameters; HyperCore controls execution, funding, liquidation, and margin. Trade.xyz is an HIP-3 deployment focused on traditional assets: turning stocks, indices, and commodities into 24/7 perpetual contracts, margined and settled in USDC, with cross-margin disabled.

How Trade.xyz Prices a Market Without External Truth

Let's start with the problem, because only by feeling it does the design make sense. A normal perpetual copies a live spot price from an exchange; a Pre-IPO perpetual has no spot price to copy, and might not for months. So the venue must use the only tool it has, its own order book, to create a credible price, and make it expensive enough to be unmovable on a whim. Everything in this section answers the same question: How do you price an asset when it doesn't have a price yet?

Two Oracle Mechanisms for After-Hours Stock Perpetuals

To understand Pre-IPO perpetuals, first understand after-hours stock perpetuals. Crypto perpetuals have real-time external prices 24/7; stocks don't. AAPL only has a real market price during US trading hours. So the oracle feeding the funding rate and mark price needs two mechanisms: one for when external data exists, another for when it doesn't. When the external market is open, a relayer feeds the institutional fair price (sources include Pyth) directly as the oracle. When the market is closed, the oracle must rely solely on the perpetual's own order book. This is where the design gets clever.

The Internal Oracle: Three Core Ideas

Look at where the executable order book really is.

The relayer calculates the average execution price of pushing a fixed $1,000 order into each side of the order book, deriving an executable bid and ask price. If the current oracle price falls within this range, nothing happens – the order book and oracle are aligned, and the oracle stays put. Only when the oracle price falls outside this range, meaning real order depth is willing to trade at a deviating price, will the oracle be pushed towards the order book. Heavy buying pressure pulls it up, heavy selling pressure pushes it down, and noise within the range is completely ignored. To move this oracle, you must commit real liquidity, not just a few trades.

The oracle never jumps.

It converges slowly towards the order book with a thirty-minute time constant, with a hard cap ensuring any single update can only close about 9.5% of the remaining distance, regardless of time since the last update. Halts and irregular updates cannot cause a gap.

The mark price is the median.

The mark price, driving margin and liquidation, is the median of three candidates: the oracle itself, the oracle plus a short-term moving average of the perpetual's basis, and an order book snapshot (best bid, best ask, last traded price). The median structure ensures a fast variable can never drag the mark price too far from the slow oracle. The hourly funding fee further pushes the market towards the oracle, with standard multipliers and caps ensuring any single hour's payment is small.

Pre-IPO Perpetuals: Same Engine, Three Modifications

An IPOP (Pre-IPO Perpetual) is essentially an after-hours stock perpetual that will never have a 'Friday close' to rely on. Before listing, there is no external price, so the market must run its internal pricing mechanism continuously, sometimes for months. Trade.xyz made three modifications for this, each revealing the nature of the problem.

1. The funding rate is slashed to 1% of the standard rate. Weekend perpetuals can drift for up to two days, but Monday's open corrects them, so normal funding is tolerable. An IPOP might trade for over sixty days without any anchor, and markets tend to settle into persistent premiums or discounts reflecting pure sentiment. At standard rates, anyone holding against the prevailing sentiment would be drained by funding fees long before the IPO arrives. Cutting the multiplier to near zero is what makes this contract actually holdable. Our view: more than any oracle cleverness, it is this single parameter that made trade.xyz's product tradeable, and the funding data later in this report confirms it.
2. Initial seed price. Weekend markets initialize with the last real external price. An IPOP has no history, so trade.xyz sets its own initial reference price. It's not a prediction, just a mathematical starting point. For SPCX (launched late UTC on May 17), the reference price was set at $150 per share: the midpoint of SpaceX's publicly reported $1.75T–$2T target valuation, divided by an assumed fully diluted share count of 11.87 billion.
3. Discovery bound. A price collar around the reference price that the mark price cannot cross, paired with a rule: positions with a liquidation price outside the current collar will not be liquidated while the collar is active.

For SPCX with 5x leverage, the collar width is ±20%. A static collar either freezes price or becomes useless, so the collar is a staircase: when the slow oracle reaches 90% of the distance to the upper bound, the reference price resets to that upper bound, and a new 20% collar opens around it.

SPCX has seven such steps in each direction. Compounding them, the hard lifetime range for the contract starting from the $150 seed price is roughly $25 to $645 per share.

The Cost to Manipulate This Market: Expensive, Visible, Slow

This division of labor is crucial for anyone trying to manipulate. The mark price reacts fast but has a hard ceiling; a single pump can almost instantly hit the ceiling and then it freezes there.

The oracle is a thirty-minute slow average, and it's the gatekeeper: only when the oracle hits the 90% trigger line does the step move up. To push the price up one level, an attacker must prop up the entire order book against arbitrageurs for nearly an hour, then repeat for the next level. Expensive, visible, slow – that's the design intent, and so far, it has held firm.

The Two Builders: Trade.xyz vs. Ventuals

Ventuals: Partial Trust in External Data

The Pre-IPO perpetuals on Hyperliquid come from two HIP-3 builders that answer the same question from opposite directions. Trade.xyz trusts its own order book; Ventuals partially trusts external data. Ventuals prices valuation, not share price: a SPACEX price of 1,989 implies a market-implied company valuation of $1.989T. Its oracle is a weighted hybrid: one-third from Notice.co's external valuation estimates, two-thirds from a two-hour moving average of Ventuals' own mark price.

Notice aggregates secondary trades, bid/ask quotes, funding announcements, mutual fund valuations, 409A valuations, and public comparable company data, polling at least every minute. The deliberately set one-third weight is Ventuals' answer to the 'IPO spike problem': anchoring to primary market reality while giving the market mathematical room to price upwards. Also, note that two-thirds of this oracle is Ventuals' own market – the design is more self-referential than its marketing suggests.

Its manipulation resistance is built on the price path, not in range steps. Orders cannot deviate from the oracle by more than 20%, enforced by the matching engine. The mark price updates every three seconds, with a maximum change of 1% per update. Once the short-term impact price deviates from its one-minute average by more than 2%, the mark price's update coefficient immediately drops to zero, so sudden volatility must persist for the mark price to follow. Funding is dynamic: around 15% annualized when the market is close to the oracle, increasing exponentially with deviation, approaching nearly 1% per hour near the collar's edge.

The endgame design is also completely different. When a company lists, Ventuals' market settles and halts: funding goes to zero, the mark price is forcibly rewritten to the valuation implied by the first-day closing price, and all positions are forced closed. It