Hyperliquid may have just changed how people think about IPO price discovery.
The IPO priced at $135, but SPCX-USDC on Hyperliquid never really traded like $135 was the fair value.
As IPO details came out, SPCX-USDC sold off under $200, then spent days prior to the IPO chopping in the $150-$180 range.
On IPO day $SPCX traded much closer to that range than the official IPO price.
Most people without an allocation were never getting filled anywhere close to $135, and the first real fills were closer to where Hyperliquid had already been pricing it.
The obvious value of tokenized pre-IPO shares is access; but the deeper value is price discovery, and Hyperliquid just proved it can be a real pre-IPO price discovery engine.
Hyperliquid showed that a synthetic pre-IPO market can become a better price discovery venue than the actual IPO process itself, and I think this really changes the way people think about these markets.
The access matters as it allows retail to trade private companies, because defi can create a more efficient public market around tradfi assets before tradfi lets most people participate
If @HyperliquidX can price SpaceX before Nasdaq opens, then future IPOs may have two prices: the official allocation price, and actual fair value the market discovers first.
Anthropic is the next obvious test for this.
USDC became the standard because it had distribution. However, post-genius act, the distribution wanted its own economics.
So it's no surprise Mastercard, Visa and Stripe are involved with OUSD: major payment processors have been making relentless moves in the stablecoin sector for the past year.
OUSD: Shared reserve yield, no mint/redeem fees, launched by 140+ companies.
For Circle, the writing was on the wall months ago when, their arguably most important partner, polymarket launched their stablecoin.
The flagship platforms do not want to be passive endpoints for someone elseโs dollar. They want the yield, the roadmap, and they've always wanted to sit closer to the settlement layer. Even though polymarkets stablecoin is backed by USDC, polymarket placed itself directly inside the settlement layer.
I'm not writing off Circle, but USDC being the default is no longer a given, and although I'd argue mainly yield farming driven: there has always been growing stablecoin competition in defi.
And don't forget, USDC was never even the largest stablecoin. Current supply roughly $184B USDT vs $74B USDC.
The platforms that bring the users and volume are done giving away the carry.
Hyperliquid may have just changed how people think about IPO price discovery.
The IPO priced at $135, but SPCX-USDC on Hyperliquid never really traded like $135 was the fair value.
As IPO details came out, SPCX-USDC sold off under $200, then spent days prior to the IPO chopping in the $150-$180 range.
On IPO day $SPCX traded much closer to that range than the official IPO price.
Most people without an allocation were never getting filled anywhere close to $135, and the first real fills were closer to where Hyperliquid had already been pricing it.
The obvious value of tokenized pre-IPO shares is access; but the deeper value is price discovery, and Hyperliquid just proved it can be a real pre-IPO price discovery engine.
Hyperliquid showed that a synthetic pre-IPO market can become a better price discovery venue than the actual IPO process itself, and I think this really changes the way people think about these markets.
The access matters as it allows retail to trade private companies, because defi can create a more efficient public market around tradfi assets before tradfi lets most people participate
If @HyperliquidX can price SpaceX before Nasdaq opens, then future IPOs may have two prices: the official allocation price, and actual fair value the market discovers first.
Anthropic is the next obvious test for this.