An implied valuation of 2.1 trillion? The truth about Binance Anthropic contract leverage

According to Woofun AI, the implied valuation of Anthropic's pre-listing perpetual contract on the Binance platform has surpassed $2.1 trillion. This astonishing figure is not due to company fundamentals, but is driven up by specific trading mechanisms and denominator settings in the derivatives market.

On September 9, the ANTHROPICUSDT contract's trading price climbed above $2,100. The core logic behind this price formation is that Binance uses 1 billion shares as the computational denominator, thereby amplifying the price of a single contract to a trillion-dollar total market capitalization.

According to data compiled by Woofun AI, this valuation is about twice the value of Anthropic's Series H funding estimate, and even reached about 30 times its revenue growth rate. Although the financing data disclosed in May provided a historical benchmark for the market, contract trading volume at the level of tens of millions of dollars is enough to continue to push up derivatives quotes through temporary share counts in the absence of public stock price references.

There is a significant mismatch between this financing valuation determined based on private securities negotiations and continuous trading derivatives quotes set within the exchange, making it difficult for the market to verify the accuracy of the denominators used in perpetual contracts.

Judging from the trading mechanism, Binance allows the contract to use up to 20x leverage, which greatly amplifies the risk of price fluctuations. The rules require funding to be replenished every 8 hours, and the fee rate for each interval is +0.005%. If there is an adverse change in price or if the trader fails to meet the additional margin requirements, the relevant collateral will face liquidation, which in turn will trigger forced liquidation of the position. Although the leverage function allows traders to establish positions with less capital, it also causes price fluctuations to easily trigger chain reactions. According to data from September 9, new and old positions are frequently alternated in the market, and both new positions are established and old positions are liquidated, but this does not prove that the liquidation led to price changes, nor does it indicate that the market can accept large orders without price fluctuations. Since there is currently no public Anthropic stock index, contract quotes lack anchors, and any technical changes may be misinterpreted as actual financial losses.

Essentially, this agreement does not represent ownership of Anthropic, nor is it endorsed or endorsed by the company. Until the IPO brought a clear capital structure, announced share price ranges, and an observable actual share price, this implied valuation was only the result of a combination of Binance's own market environment, leverage rules, and estimated denominators. Binance said that once it is discovered that a stable third-party index can be used, the pre-listing contract may be converted into a standard traditional financial perpetual contract, and the price will gradually be in line with the actual stock price at that time. Until then, traders should be wary of seeing the price of such derivatives, which lack the support of an authoritative index, as a risk of stabilizing stock prices.