Robot maker Unitree is going public. Hyperliquid traders see 4x upside from IPO price

Hyperliquid rose to prominence as an onchain venue for perpetual futures, derivatives that allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions without an expiration date. Markets built on its infrastructure have since expanded the concept beyond crypto into commodities like oil and gold, and most recently, into private companies preparing to go public.

Pre-IPO perps don’t provide ownership in the underlying company, and positions cannot be converted into actual shares. What they enable is a synthetic market for traders to speculate on a company's valuation before its 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 pay attention to that price-discovery mechanism.

A pre-IPO contract tracking Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT came within 2.5% of its Shanghai opening price at the bell in July, Allium analysts noted.

Hyperliquid traders also correctly anticipated in June that Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) would debut higher on the stock market than its $135 IPO price.

Painful convergence

Unitree has already attracted meaningful activity. There are two Hyperliquid markets — operated by Trade.xyz and Paragon — and altogether have accumulated $9.1 million in open interest and about $59 million in turnover, according to Allium.