Key Takeaways:
Hyperliquid traders value Unitree Robotics at nearly $38 billion, more than four times the $9 billion valuation set for its Shanghai IPO, Allium data shows.
Pre-IPO perpetual contracts on the onchain venue traded between $92 and $94 on Friday, equivalent to a valuation of about $38 billion, blockchain analytics firm Allium said in a report.
Unitree priced its STAR Market offering at 150.80 yuan ($22.37) per share. Revenue reached $253 million last year, up 335 percent, with humanoid robot shipments topping 5,500. The IPO was 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail investors, with trading expected to begin between Aug. 17 and Aug. 21.
The fourfold premium means Unitree could have a blockbuster debut and still leave leveraged bulls nursing steep losses. An opening around $45, double the IPO price, would still be about 52 percent below the current perp price and could liquidate roughly 33 percent of long exposure, Allium said.
The two Hyperliquid markets — operated by Trade.xyz and Paragon — have accumulated $9.1 million in open interest and about $59 million in turnover. The contracts traded just 1.6 percent apart on average when both markets were active.
Pre-IPO perps don't provide ownership in the underlying company, and positions can't be converted into actual shares. They enable a synthetic market for traders to speculate on a company's valuation before shares begin trading, with the price expected to converge toward the public stock once a reference market becomes available.
Recent listings have given traders reason to watch that price-discovery mechanism. A pre-IPO contract tracking Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT came within 2.5 percent of its Shanghai opening price at the bell in July. Hyperliquid traders also correctly anticipated in June that Elon Musk's SpaceX would debut higher on the stock market than its $135 IPO price.
Positioning on Trade.xyz, the bigger market of the two, is almost evenly split, with $6.5 million long and $6.6 million short. Smaller traders are more bearish: bets below $50,000 are 70 percent short by value.
"Any open away from today's price forces one side of this market out," Allium said.
At the other extreme, a $128 opening price, nearly six times the IPO price, could liquidate an estimated 53 percent of short positions. If shares open at around where the perps trade, neither side is liquidated.
The convergence between the perp market and the public listing will test whether Hyperliquid's pre-IPO price discovery can match the accuracy it showed with CXMT and SpaceX, or whether leveraged traders on both sides face a painful unwind when Unitree begins trading next week.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
