Hypercall Opens Anthropic Pre-IPO Options on Hyperliquid Ahead of ANT Listing

Hypercall, an onchain options platform built on the Hyperliquid L1 blockchain, expects to launch options tied to Anthropic on Monday, according to founder Jake Sylvestre and growth and marketing head Dan Edlebeck, who spoke with The Block. The contracts would be, in Hypercall's description, the first options market tied to the AI company before it goes public.

The timing is not accidental. Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on October 26, 2026, and is targeting a November listing under the ticker ANT. Hypercall wants traders positioned before the opening bell, not chasing it.

What is Hypercall actually selling?

No one gets Anthropic shares. The platform offers European-style options, exercisable only at expiry, cash-settled in USDC. Traders who land on the right side of the bet receive the dollar difference in the stablecoin and nothing else.

Two structural details stand out. Long options positions carry no liquidation risk, and trading runs 24/7, weekends included. That is a sharper wrapper than most TradFi venues offer, though the underlying exposure is synthetic.

The platform went live on mainnet on June 1, 2026. Its first product was options on SpaceX, listed as SPCX. Since then, Hypercall says it has processed nearly $592 million in cumulative notional options volume by early October 2026. September alone accounted for roughly $536 million of that.

Here is the wrinkle worth noticing: most of that September activity came from S&P 500 contracts, not exotic private-company bets. The platform's traction rests largely on a very traditional index, with pre-IPO names layered on top.

Sylvestre is not a first-time operator. He previously developed the Synapse protocol, which recorded over $55–60 billion in volume.

How does this fit the existing Anthropic speculation?

Crypto traders are already pricing the company. Pre-IPO perpetual futures on Anthropic recently reached $134 million in open interest, implying a valuation of around $1.9 trillion.

Options add something perps cannot. Perpetuals are directional; you are long or short and that is the whole story. Options let traders express views on volatility, place defined-risk bets, or hedge existing exposure elsewhere. For a company whose eventual debut price is anyone's guess, that difference matters.

What does this change for retail traders?

Access, mostly. Retail investors usually cannot touch a company like Anthropic until it lists. Hypercall offers synthetic exposure before that moment, with losses on long positions capped at the premium paid.

For Hyperliquid, the launch extends a pattern rather than starting one. The chain has become a growing home for markets that tie crypto rails to traditional assets, from index contracts to private companies. Hypercall's September numbers, driven mostly by S&P 500 options, show demand for TradFi-style products on crypto infrastructure is not purely theoretical.

Three things will tell the story from here. First, whether trading actually begins Monday as planned. Second, how much volume and open interest the Anthropic contracts attract against the platform's S&P 500 business. Third, how closely onchain pricing tracks Anthropic's eventual debut under ANT, assuming the November listing proceeds on schedule.