How onchain infrastructure is changing pre-IPO markets
For most investors, the IPO is the moment when a private company finally becomes a market. Before that, valuation is mostly a private conversation. A funding round establishes a price. Secondary transactions provide occasional reference points. Private-market platforms may offer liquidity, but access is limited and pricing is not continuously visible.
Onchain markets are starting to change that.
The recent rise of pre-IPO perpetual markets around companies such as SpaceX and Anthropic shows that traders no longer have to wait for the public listing to express a view on what a company might be worth. SpaceX became the clearest example earlier this year: its pre-IPO perpetual traded for weeks before the company eventually went public, creating a market around an asset that did not yet have a public exchange price. Research from Talos found more than $215 million in open interest and $2.2 billion in cumulative volume across venues before the IPO. (Talos)
But this raises a more interesting question than who gets access to these markets?: Where does the price come from?
That is where the infrastructure becomes much more important.
The problem with pricing something that does not trade
Pricing BTC or ETH is relatively straightforward. There are multiple liquid markets operating around the clock. An oracle can aggregate prices across venues, filter out abnormal observations and produce a reference price.
A pre-IPO company is completely different.
Anthropic, for example, does not have a public stock exchange price. There is no Nasdaq order book that an oracle can simply read. Its last major funding round provides a valuation reference, and secondary transactions can provide another signal, but neither gives you a continuous market price.
And yet a perpetual market needs a price every second.
The mark price can determine funding, liquidations and the value of open positions. If that price is wrong, the consequences are not theoretical. A bad feed can trigger liquidations, distort funding and potentially create a cascade. This is why I think the most interesting part of the current pre-IPO market is not the trading interface. It is the data architecture underneath it.
Building a price instead of simply reading one
This is where RedStone’s infrastructure becomes particularly interesting.
For an asset with no clean public price, the problem cannot be solved by simply connecting an oracle to an exchange. The system needs to combine different signals and determine which one deserves more weight at any given moment.
RedStone’s infrastructure for Entropy’s HIP-3 markets does exactly that. Entropy’s methodology combines its own order book with an external reference supplied by RedStone. Instead of treating both sources equally, the methodology looks at executable liquidity: essentially, how much real size is actually available behind the quoted price.
When the order book has meaningful depth, the market’s own price receives more weight. When that liquidity becomes thin, the system shifts more weight toward the external reference. The result is not a fixed price feed. It is a dynamic way of deciding which source is more trustworthy right now.
That distinction matters.
A price displayed on an order book is not necessarily a reliable price. A trader can move a thin market with relatively little capital. If an oracle blindly follows that market, the oracle can end up amplifying the problem.
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Looking at executable depth gives the system another layer of context. It asks not only “What price is the market showing?” but also “How much real liquidity is supporting that price?”
That is a much more useful question when the underlying asset does not have a mature public market.
The oracle cannot invent liquidity
There is another important point here. An oracle cannot manufacture a market. If there are only a few traders willing to buy or sell an asset, there is no mathematical trick that can turn that into deep liquidity. What infrastructure can do is make better use of the liquidity and information that actually exist.
This is particularly important for pre-IPO markets because the price itself is part of the discovery process. For Anthropic, for example, the market may be influenced by its latest private valuation, secondary-market transactions, funding expectations, other pre-IPO venues and the actual demand coming from traders on the perpetual market.
None of these signals is perfect on its own. The infrastructure therefore has to combine imperfect information into something usable. That is fundamentally different from the traditional oracle problem of simply aggregating several highly liquid exchanges.
Keeping the market alive when Wall Street is closed
There is another problem created by moving traditional assets onto 24/7 markets. Stocks don’t trade 24/7. A perpetual market does.
SanDisk, for example, trades on Nasdaq during US market hours. An onchain perpetual can continue trading overnight and throughout the weekend. If the oracle simply stops when Nasdaq closes, the market is left with an outdated reference price precisely when traders are still active.
RedStone Live is designed around this problem. During traditional market hours, it can source prices from licensed institutional providers. When those markets close, it can switch to other venues, including derivatives markets, so that the feed continues to reflect live trading rather than simply freezing at the last traditional-market print.
Security becomes part of the price
The other part that is easy to overlook is how the data actually reaches the chain. For Entropy’s markets, RedStone uses a 4-of-6 multisig configuration. Four independent signers must agree before an update can be pushed onchain. That might sound like a technical implementation detail, but it is directly connected to market integrity.
If a price determines liquidations worth millions of dollars, the question is not only whether the data source is accurate. It is also whether a single compromised key, server or operator can manipulate what eventually reaches the blockchain.
RedStone’s HyperStone architecture was built specifically for HIP-3 markets, combining the verification quorum with separate primary and fallback price states and infrastructure designed around Hyperliquid’s latency requirements.
In other words, oracle infrastructure is becoming part of the market itself. The exchange provides the trading environment. Market makers provide liquidity. But the data layer determines what price the rest of the system believes.
The infrastructure will determine whether this scales
The pre-IPO market is still young. There are obvious risks: leverage, fragmented liquidity, regulatory uncertainty, manipulation and the fact that a perpetual contract is not the same thing as owning a company’s shares.
But these markets are already showing that there is demand for something traditional finance has historically been slow to provide: continuous price discovery for assets that are difficult or impossible to trade directly.
The next stage will depend less on whether another company can launch a pre-IPO market and more on whether those markets can become reliable.
That means better liquidity. Better market design. Better risk controls. And, perhaps most importantly, better data infrastructure.
And that may ultimately be one of the most important pieces of infrastructure behind the next generation of onchain markets.
