Ventuals Shut Down: Where Its Pre-IPO Perps Went

VentualsvsEntropy

EntropyGuides is an independent site with no relationship to Ventuals, Entropy or trade.xyz. Links to Entropy carry our referral code. Market figures were pulled from the Hyperliquid info API on 2026-08-26.

Ventuals is gone. All 15 of its markets return isDelisted: true on-chain, the last day they generated a non-zero fee was 2026-06-18, and its own page title reads "Ventuals is sunsetting". More than $650M of lifetime volume passed through it, the 500,000 HYPE deployer stake was returned 1:1, and no token was ever issued.

If you arrived here from a guide telling you to farm a Ventuals airdrop, stop. That is the most important sentence on this page.

The zombie-guide problem

A dozen sites still publish Ventuals farming instructions. Airdrops.io lists the campaign as ended and still walks through the steps. Cryptorank's drop-hunting section, thecryptoairdrop, usethebitcoin, MEXC Learn and perp.wiki all carry live pages with wallet-connection and volume-generation instructions for a reward that does not exist. CoinMarketCap's June 2026 pre-IPO research covered Hyperliquid pre-IPO exposure "via TradeXYZ and Ventuals" days before the Ventuals markets settled.

None of that was malicious. Pre-IPO perps moved fast in the first half of 2026 and content did not keep up. But the practical result is that a reader following the top search result today is generating volume on a dead protocol, or worse, hunting for a claim page that only a phisher would ever build.

What Ventuals actually was, and what settled

Ventuals was a HIP-3 builder-deployed perp DEX on Hyperliquid under the deployer ticker vntl, running cash-settled perpetuals on private-company valuations. It was the first venue most traders used for on-chain OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX exposure.

The settled marks are still readable on-chain, which is useful if you are reconciling old positions or old screenshots:

The small gaps between the on-chain values and the reported ones are a snapshot-timing artifact, not a discrepancy worth reading anything into. The wind-down was covered by CoinDesk, The Defiant and Bankless Times in June 2026. Its founders were subsequently reported to have joined Phantom, the wallet company. Ventuals has not published a detailed post-mortem, and we are not going to invent one.

Its deployer ticker still sits in the HIP-3 league table with $255,991 of all-time fees and zeros in every current column, alongside other retired deployers: Felix Perps (16 markets delisted, last fee 2026-06-20, and note the parent Felix protocol is alive and unrelated to that closure), dreamcash Markets (17 delisted), and Kinetiq's legacy km ticker.

Where each Ventuals market went

Three things about that table matter more than the rows themselves.

These are not continuations. io:ANTH is not "the Ventuals Anthropic market moved". It is a new contract, deployed by a different operator (Bursa Global Inc., a Panama company), with its own oracle design, its own bounds and its own settlement date of 2028-08-18. John Wang publicly framed Entropy as stepping into the niche Ventuals left, and that framing is about the niche, not the contract.

Name the deployer, every time. xyz:SPCX appears on Entropy's frontend, because Entropy's app aggregates 319 markets from six venues and 101 of them are trade.xyz's. That does not make it an Entropy market. trade.xyz sets its parameters, runs its oracle and holds the key that can halt it. If you route SpaceX flow through entropy.io, your market risk is trade.xyz's.

The OpenAI gap is real and unexplained. Entropy registered io:OAI with a last price of 1250 and 3x leverage, and it has never printed a candle. It is delisted alongside io:IONQ and io:NBIS. No reason has been published for any of the three, and this site does not speculate about motive. If you want on-chain OpenAI exposure today, it is not on Entropy.

The options that are not HIP-3

Not everyone wants another builder-deployed perp after watching one wind down. Three other shapes of exposure exist, and they are genuinely different products.

Centralized venues. Coinbase lists ANTHROPIC-PERP, OPENAI-PERP and a SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual as a CFTC-regulated US venue, which makes it the most direct contest to any claim that HIP-3 is the only way to trade these names. OKX, Binance, Bybit, Bitget and Crypto.com run stock and pre-IPO perpetuals of their own. All of them require an account and identity verification, and none of them is self-custodial. Aevo also runs pre-launch markets, at a 0.25% taker rate that is roughly 27 times what a Growth Mode HIP-3 market costs.

Non-HIP-3 perp venues. Ostium runs real-world-asset perps on Arbitrum with leverage up to 200x, underwritten by a vault rather than an order book, and publishes a full fee schedule. It carries no pre-IPO markets at all, so it replaces a SanDisk position and not an Anthropic one. It also geo-blocks US users.

Products that actually hold something. xStocks and Backed, Ondo Global Markets, Dinari and Securitize issue tokens backed by shares, and Forge Global, EquityZen and Hiive broker actual secondary-market stakes to accredited investors. The distinction matters more than the fee: a tokenized share is a claim on a share, while every pre-IPO perpetual in this article explicitly gives holders no shares, no voting rights and no claim against the company. Entropy's own legal page says exactly that.

What changed mechanically between Ventuals and its successors

If you traded Ventuals, four things will feel different.

Quote convention. io:ANTH is market-cap denominated: $1 of price equals $1B of implied valuation. A mark of 1995.2 implies roughly a $2.00 trillion valuation for Anthropic, with catastrophic bounds set at 300 and 4,200. It is not a share price and it is not comparable to a secondary-market share quote. Our pre-IPO perps explainer covers the convention.

Leverage is lower. io:ANTH caps at 3x. Ventuals' pre-IPO markets ran with their own limits and traders arriving from there often size as if the old cap applies.

Open-interest caps bite. io:ANTH sat at $3.33M against a $5M cap on 2026-08-26, roughly 67% full, after the cap was raised on 2026-08-25. When a cap is reached, new positions are simply rejected. See cannot open position.

Fees are the HIP-3 schedule, not the venue's. Every HIP-3 deployer inherits 2x the standard perp rate, split evenly between Hyperliquid and the deployer, with Growth Mode optionally scaling everything by 0.1. Entropy's live rate on both its markets is 0.0030% maker and 0.0090% taker. trade.xyz runs Growth Mode too and lands in the same range. There is no fee arbitrage between HIP-3 venues. Details in the fees guide.

The crash worth carrying with you

On 2026-05-28, Ventuals' SpaceX perpetual fell around 45% in about 17 minutes. Reporting at the time attributed it to bad data from an external pricing vendor feeding the market's oracle rather than to genuine trading. Roughly 1,393 positions across about 400 wallets were liquidated. The deployer chose to compensate affected traders, at its own discretion, with no protocol mechanism obliging it to.

That is the most instructive event in this whole category, and it is directly relevant to picking a successor venue. Three lessons transfer:

1. The oracle is the product. In a market with no external reference price on a public exchange, pricing methodology is the entire risk surface. Entropy's pre-IPO mark is a 5-minute EMA of Entropy's own order book and, in its own words, "does not blend external sources directly". That mark drives liquidations.
2. There is no vault to catch you. HIP-3 markets have no liquidator vault backstop, so auto-deleveraging is the immediate fallback and, per Entropy's docs, "cannot be opted out of". A profitable position can be closed against your will.
3. Compensation is discretionary everywhere. Ventuals made its traders whole because it decided to. Nothing in HIP-3 requires that of any deployer, and no deployer in this cohort has published a policy committing to it.

We go through all eight structural risks, quoting the documentation, in is Entropy safe. Read it before you replace a Ventuals position with a HIP-3 one.

A migration checklist

1. Delete the airdrop bookmarks. No token, no claim, no retroactive anything.
2. Reconcile old marks from on-chain data, not from screenshots. The settled values above are still queryable through the Hyperliquid info endpoint.
3. Match the market, not the brand. Anthropic exposure means io:ANTH (Entropy) or a centralized venue. SpaceX means xyz:SPCX (trade.xyz) or a centralized venue. Write down which operator holds the keys for whatever you pick.
4. Re-learn the quote convention before sizing anything. Market-cap denomination has produced more confused first trades in this category than any other single feature.
5. Check the OI cap and the leverage cap on the specific market, not the venue.
6. Check geographic access first. Entropy's terms list the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Panama as restricted jurisdictions, and its geo endpoint returns restricted:true with "mode":"trading" from a US IP. See restricted countries.
7. Fund correctly. Collateral is USDC bridged from Arbitrum One. Phantom does not support Arbitrum One, which is a common way for deposits to arrive and appear invisible. See deposit USDC and deposit not arriving.

If you decide Entropy is where you want the Anthropic exposure, the how to trade walkthrough covers the onboarding sequence, including the builder-fee approval step that is not documented anywhere in Entropy's docs corpus.

None of this is legal, tax or investment advice, and none of it is a recommendation to trade any of these venues. Pre-IPO perpetuals are cash-settled contracts that give holders no shares, no voting rights and no claim against the referenced company, which every operator in this category states in its own documentation. Read those documents, and talk to a professional about your own situation. Our methodology explains where these figures come from.