IOSG: SpaceX 상장 당일, 세 가지 영구 메커니즘의 첫 번째 실제 테스트

Original Author: Mario Chow

Original Source: IOSG Ventures

TL;DR

1. Why is Pre-IPO Perpetual Important? It pries open two doors that were previously closed to almost everyone: first, placing directional bets on private companies like SpaceX and OpenAI *before* their IPO, and second, obtaining a real-time price during nights, weekends, and pre-market hours when stock markets are closed but news continues to drive prices. Now, anyone with a wallet can place these bets continuously, permissionlessly, and just in time for the biggest wave of IPOs in history.
2. How to price an asset without a public spot price? This is the core challenge for the entire category. Without an external price to copy (which can sometimes be stale for months), trading venues must create a price using only their own order book—their sole resource—and only move it when real money is willing to trade at a deviation: slow to move and expensive to fake. Trade.xyz uses an internal oracle coupled with a price band, while Ventuals relies partially on primary market data. Surprisingly, this works: the perpetual predicted Cerebras's opening price within 1.3%, and even priced crude oil over a weekend when all traditional venues were dark.
3. What worked in the SpaceX case? Trade.xyz captured the on-chain market (~96.5% of volume), not because its oracle is smarter, but because near-zero funding fees made holding the position virtually costless, it launched *coinciding* with the IPO catalyst, and it was priced per-share, enabling cross-exchange arbitrage. On listing day, June 12th, the transition from synthetic perpetual to spot-tracking was clean: no oracle gap, no liquidation cascade. The perpetual tracked Nasdaq's real-time price within 1% ($152 vs. $150 execution price); its pre-market mark price also aligned perfectly with Nasdaq's own indicative opening price (~$175), before the final execution cleared at the lower $150.
4. What unresolved risks remain? This category is excellent at handling prices but still primitive at handling events. Corporate actions, especially a stock split post-conversion, have no pipeline on-chain: Trade.xyz has not disclosed any rebase mechanism, while Ventuals outsources this to a single data provider, which has already failed once (an expired split adjustment caused its market to flash crash 45%). The bottleneck isn't price discovery; it's the boring 'corporate actions' processing layer. Traditional markets took a century to standardize it; on-chain hasn't rebuilt it yet. Whoever can deliver it reliably will fill the last gap between these markets and the ones they aim to replace.

Background: Two Locked Doors Just Kicked Open by Crypto

Pre-IPO perpetual contracts sit at the intersection of two things that, until recently, were almost completely closed off. Crypto's rails have now pried both doors open.

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

Pre-listing shares of SpaceX or OpenAI were previously only accessible to accredited investors, VCs, and a few secondary desks, with opaque valuations reset only during funding rounds. Pre-IPO perpetuals have torn down this wall. Anyone with a wallet can bet on the direction of a private company's valuation, anytime, permissionlessly, without touching any shares, quotas, or voting rights. The timing is impeccable, coinciding with the largest wave of IPOs ever. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12th at an ~$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 prices post-IPO.

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

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

A key premise of this report: the after-hours quote is not a random guess; it often lands precisely where the real market will reopen. One Saturday, a Middle East conflict drove up oil prices, with only Hyperliquid actively trading; when CME crude futures reopened Sunday evening, the price was exactly where Hyperliquid's perpetual had already found it. TD Securities estimates that this platform digested about 80% of the recent oil price volatility before traditional exchanges even opened. The same is true for stocks: trade.xyz's Cerebras perpetual missed Nasdaq's final opening price by only ~1.3%. During after-hours, the perpetual contract itself *is* the market.

How Early Are We? Only ~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 little over 1% of total TradFi perpetual volume since its launch around May 21st.

On Binance, Pre-IPO volume is also heavily concentrated in a few names: SpaceX accounts for ~79%, OpenAI 11%, and Anthropic 9%. This category launched around May 20th, and Binance quickly captured over 60% of that share. Pre-IPO on CEXs is still embryonic, dominated by SpaceX. The truly interesting activity is on-chain.

SPCX Landscape Across Exchanges: Binance Leads, Hyperliquid Holds On-Chain Home Court

Market Snapshot on June 10th

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

On-Chain Landscape: A Market with Only One Builder

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

Trade.xyz has accumulated ~$658M in total volume, with SPCX accounting for $552M and the second ticker, QNT, for $106M, all within about three weeks. Ventuals has accumulated ~$152M, more evenly spread across SPACEX ($53M), OPENAI ($43M), and ANTHROPIC ($56M), taking about seven months.

Placing them on the same timeline makes the gap stark. Within the overlapping window since SPCX's launch, trade.xyz captured roughly 96.5% of on-chain Pre-IPO volume, corroborating third-party estimates of "~95% of the Hyperliquid Pre-IPO basket." Ventuals lists more tickers, including the only currently active Anthropic and OpenAI contracts, but captures only a tiny fraction of the flow. Listing isn't a moat; liquidity is.

HIP-3: The Platform Layer Underneath It All

HIP-3 is an upgrade to Hyperliquid, transforming the single perpetual venue into a platform for builders to deploy perpetual DEXs. Any team staking 500,000 HYPE can deploy their own perpetual market on Hyperliquid's matching engine, HyperCore. Builders control listing, oracle, leverage caps, 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 isolated margin only.

How Trade.xyz Prices a Market Without an External Benchmark

Let's start with the problem, because the design only makes sense once you feel it. A standard perpetual copies a live spot price from an exchange; a Pre-IPO perpetual has no spot price to copy, potentially for months. So the venue must create a credible price using its only resource, its own order book, and make it expensive to move. Everything in this section answers one question: how do you price an asset that 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 24/7 real-time external prices; stocks don't. AAPL only has a real market price during US trading hours. So the oracle feeding the mark price and funding rate needs two mechanisms: one when external data is available, another when it's not. When the external market is open, a relayer passes the institutional fair price directly (sources include Pyth) as the oracle. When the market is closed, the oracle must rely solely on the perpetual's own order book. This second mechanism is where the design's true craft lies.

The Internal Oracle: Three Core Ideas

Look where the executable order book actually is.

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

The oracle never jumps.

It converges slowly towards the order book with a thirty-minute time constant, and a hard cap ensures a single update can only close about 9.5% of the remaining distance, no matter how long since the last update. Halts and irregular updates cannot cause a gap.

The mark price is the median.

The mark price, which drives 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 trade). The median structure prevents fast variables from ever dragging the mark price too far from the slow oracle. Hourly funding fees then push the market back 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 simply no external price, so the market must run its internal pricing mechanism continuously, sometimes for months. Trade.xyz makes three modifications, each revealing the problem's core.

1. The funding rate is slashed to 1% of the standard rate. Weekend perpetuals might drift for two days but are corrected on Monday's open, so normal funding is tolerable. An IPOP might trade for over sixty days without any anchor, and markets tend to settle into persistent premium or discount reflecting pure sentiment. At standard rates, anyone holding against prevailing sentiment would be bled dry by funding fees long before the IPO arrives. Slashing the multiplier to near zero makes the contract truly holdable. Our view: more than any oracle cleverness, this single parameter makes trade.xyz's product tradeable, and the funding data later in this report confirms it.
2. An initial seed price. Weekend markets initialize with the last real external price. An IPOP has no history, so trade.xyz sets an initial reference price. It's not a prediction, just a mathematical starting point. For SPCX (launched late UTC on May 17th), the reference price was $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. A discovery bound. A price collar around the reference price that the mark price cannot cross, with a rule that 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 would either freeze the price or be useless, so the collar is stepped: when the slow oracle climbs to 90% of the upper bound, the reference price re-anchors to that upper bound, and a new 20% collar opens around it.

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

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

This division of labor is critical for anyone attempting manipulation. The mark price reacts quickly but has a hard cap; a single push can almost instantly hit the ceiling and then freeze there.

The oracle is the slow, thirty-minute average; it's the gatekeeper. The step only rises when the oracle hits the 90% trigger line. To push the price up one step, an attacker would need to hold the entire order book elevated against arbitrageurs for nearly an hour, then repeat for the next step. Expensive, obvious, slow. That's the design intent, and it has held firm so far.

The Two Builders: Trade.xyz vs. Ventuals

Ventuals: Partial Trust in External Data

Pre-IPO perpetuals on Hyperliquid come from two HIP-3 builders answering the same question from opposite directions. Trade.xyz trusts its order book; Ventuals partially trusts external data. Ventuals prices valuation, not share price: a SPACEX price of 1,989 implies an ~$1.989T market-implied company valuation. Its oracle is a weighted blend: 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, indicative bid/ask quotes, funding announcements, mutual fund valuations, 409A valuations, and public comparable data, polling at least every minute. That deliberately set one-third weight is Ventuals' answer to the "IPO pop problem": anchor to primary market reality while leaving mathematical room for the market to price upwards. Don't miss another point: the oracle is two-thirds its own market, making this design considerably more self-referential than its marketing suggests.

Its manipulation resistance is built on price paths, not stepped collars. 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 move of 1% per update. If the short-term impact price deviates from its one-minute average by more than 2%, the mark price's update coefficient drops to zero immediately, meaning sudden volatility must persist for the mark price to follow. Funding is dynamic: ~15% APR when the market is near the oracle, rising exponentially with divergence, approaching ~1% per hour near the collar edge.

The endgame design is also entirely different. Upon listing, Ventuals market settles and halts: funding goes to zero, the mark price is forcibly rewritten to the valuation implied by the first day's closing price, and all positions are forcibly closed. It functions more like a prediction market betting on the first-day closing valuation than a perpetual contract. Trade.xyz's