Traders Pay 8,700% Annualized Fees in Failed Leveraged Bet on Anthropic Valuation

Traders Bet Big on Anthropic, But Paid a Steep Price

Crypto traders paid annualized fees of 8,700% to service leveraged, synthetic bets on the valuation of Anthropic, a privately held AI company nearing a $1 trillion valuation. Some traders paid 1% per hour, implying an expected Anthropic rally to $88 trillion within a year—just to break even on their leveraged long positions.

For context, the most valuable publicly traded company today, Nvidia, has a market capitalization of $5.2 trillion.

Why Were Fees So High?

The market selected for these bets doesn’t deliver real Anthropic shares. Instead, it relies on a combination of complex terminology, off-page terms of service, a small open interest cap, and a simplified trading interface. These factors obscured the extreme risks, reducing the process to a single click on a "Buy" button alongside a flickering price chart.

If you ever feel dumb, just remember people are PAYING 8,700% in funding to have pre-IPO exposure to Anthropic at a $1T valuation.

The Cost of Betting on Anthropic

Normally, short-sellers pay brokers to borrow shares for shorting, hoping to buy them back cheaper later. However, in the crypto space, buying long exposure to Anthropic was even more expensive than shorting over the weekend.

Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange, lists a USDH-denominated contract for Anthropic using the Ventuals deployer, based partially on Notice’s estimate of Anthropic’s valuation. The contract had $7.5 million worth of open interest.

If you didn’t understand the mechanics behind the contract, you likely hadn’t read Hyperliquid’s full terms of service for ANTHROPIC—and you were in the same position as many traders who bought in anyway.

The Risks Behind the Contract

USDH, the stablecoin used in the contract, has traded between $0.72 and $1.11 over the past year, raising questions about its stability. Additionally, Notice, the oracle provider, doesn’t have real-time data on Anthropic’s valuation. The entire structure relies on two proprietary altcoins and numerous service provider risks.

Despite these risks, traders paid up to 1% per hour to use 3x leverage on Anthropic’s private valuation. For most of the past two days, the contract traded above Notice’s reference price, forcing longs to pay hourly funding rates to shorts. These payouts briefly made shorting one of the most-hyped AI companies a high-yield income strategy.

Funding Rates Capped at 4% Per Hour

Hyperliquid settles funding rates hourly, with a cap of 4% per hour—not 1%. Over the weekend, the hourly rate exceeded 1.5%, translating to annualized fees in the five-digit percentages. Across a 48-hour period, longs paid shorts over 15% of their position size in funding alone.

This isn’t a typo. A $10,000 long position with no movement in Anthropic’s valuation would have lost $1,500 to the short side within two days.

Disclosures about these risks are buried in off-webpage documents. The gap between the contract’s mark price and Notice’s oracle reference price drives the funding rates on Ventuals contracts on Hyperliquid. On the ANTHROPIC Ventuals contract, Notice’s oracle sat near $934, while Hyperliquid Ventuals traders paid significantly higher rates.