Ventuals, a platform incubated by Paradigm, has announced its initiative to enable pre-IPO trading of private company shares on Hyperliquid, a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain designed for decentralized finance (DeFi).
This move aims to democratize access to a multi-trillion-dollar asset class traditionally reserved for institutional investors and venture capitalists, allowing retail investors to trade perpetual futures (perps) on private companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe before their initial public offerings (IPOs).
Ventuals leverages Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 standard (Builder Deployed Perpetuals) to create custom perpetual contract markets, utilizing a proprietary pricing mechanism called an “optimistic oracle.” This system allows anyone to submit a valuation and stake collateral, with disputes resolved through a challenge-and-vote process, transforming off-chain consensus into on-chain pricing.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 19 (Feb 9 – May 2, 2026): big discounts for early bird.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register for Tekedia AI Lab: From Technical Design to Deployment (next edition begins Jan 24 2026).
The platform addresses the challenge of pricing private equities, which lack public market data, by blending off-chain data feeds with an exponential moving average (EMA) of the perp’s mark price, ensuring price discovery while tethering valuations to real secondary market transactions.
This initiative aligns with Hyperliquid’s broader mission to break the information asymmetry and price suppression often seen in traditional IPOs, where investment banks underprice shares to benefit institutional clients. By enabling pre-IPO trading, Ventuals and Hyperliquid aim to create transparent, open markets that reduce arbitrage opportunities for insiders and allow retail investors to participate in the growth of high-potential startups.
For example, trading on Ventuals reportedly allowed investors to go long on Circle at a $7 billion valuation before its IPO, yielding up to 240% returns compared to 55% at the IPO’s $15.5 billion opening valuation. However, pre-IPO trading carries significant risks, including information asymmetry, company failure, and regulatory hurdles like SEC restrictions and lock-up periods.
Ventuals’ approach, built on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure with sub-second latency and capacity for 100,000 orders per second, aims to mitigate some of these risks through transparency and high-frequency trading capabilities. The platform’s founders, Alvin and Emily Hsia, previously built Shadow, a project focused on efficient on-chain data extraction.
This development could redefine private market access, potentially positioning Ventuals as a transformative force in DeFi and capital markets, though its success will depend on navigating regulatory complexities and maintaining robust pricing mechanisms.
By allowing retail investors to trade perpetual futures on private companies like OpenAI or SpaceX, Ventuals breaks down barriers to an asset class historically reserved for venture capitalists and institutional investors. This could expand wealth-building opportunities for a broader audience.
Traditional IPOs often favor insiders who benefit from underpriced shares. Transparent pricing on Hyperliquid’s blockchain, driven by Ventuals’ optimistic oracle, could level the playing field, giving retail investors access to valuations closer to fair market value.
Private company shares are typically illiquid, with long lock-up periods. Ventuals’ perpetual futures markets create synthetic liquidity, allowing investors to trade exposure to these assets without owning the underlying shares, potentially attracting more capital to private markets.
The optimistic oracle and Hyperliquid’s infrastructure provide a novel mechanism for pricing illiquid private equities. By combining off-chain data and on-chain mark prices, Ventuals could set a precedent for valuing private assets in a transparent, decentralized manner.
If pre-IPO trading gains traction, investment banks may face pressure to reform IPO pricing practices, as retail investors could bypass underpriced offerings and capture value earlier, reducing arbitrage opportunities for institutional players.
Advancement of DeFi and Blockchain Technology
Hyperliquid’s high-performance blockchain, with sub-second latency and 100,000 orders per second, demonstrates its ability to handle complex financial instruments like pre-IPO perps. This could drive adoption of Hyperliquid as a go-to platform for DeFi innovation.
Ventuals’ application of perpetual futures to private equities expands the scope of DeFi, showing that blockchain-based derivatives can represent real-world assets beyond cryptocurrencies or commodities. The optimistic oracle model, with its stake-and-challenge mechanism, could inspire similar pricing systems for other illiquid or hard-to-value assets.
By enabling broader access to high-growth private companies, Ventuals could contribute to reducing wealth inequality, though this depends on retail investors’ ability to manage risks and access the platform. Normalizing pre-IPO trading could shift how society views startup investing, encouraging earlier retail participation in innovation-driven companies but also potentially fueling speculative bubbles.
Increased liquidity and visibility through pre-IPO trading could make private companies more attractive to investors, potentially lowering their cost of capital and accelerating growth, though it may also pressure founders to prioritize short-term valuations over long-term strategy.
However, its success hinges on overcoming regulatory hurdles, ensuring robust pricing mechanisms, and managing the inherent risks of private market investments. If executed well, this could catalyze a broader shift toward decentralized, transparent capital markets, with ripple effects across startups, investors, and financial institutions.