How OpenAI perps work

An OpenAI perp is a cash-settled derivative on implied company valuation. One point on the ticket is one billion dollars, so a mark of 1,000 is an implied valuation of one trillion, and a ten-point move is ten billion dollars of implied value. The contract never expires, is margined and settled in USDC, and confers nothing beyond price exposure: no shares, no cap-table position, no information rights, no vote and no claim in a listing. Long and short are symmetric, which is itself notable, because there is no other instrument that lets a retail trader be short a private company.

• Underlying: implied company valuation, not a share price
• Unit: one point is one billion dollars
• Settlement: USDC, through funding and on close
• Symmetric: short is as easy as long, with nothing to borrow

With no exchange print to read, each venue constructs a reference. On Hyperliquid, OPENAI trades as io:OAI on the EntropyIO dex and the deployer acts as the oracle. Lighter and AsterDex each run a reference for their own book. The anchor in every case is the last priced funding round, adjusted for secondary transactions, tender offers and whatever else the venue decides to weigh, and the perp trades around that anchor. The reference is a methodology, not an observation, and a change to the methodology moves the mark without any news about the company.

A BTC perp cannot stay far from spot because arbitrageurs buy one and sell the other. An OpenAI perp has no spot. Nobody can buy or short the actual shares to close the gap, so the perp can hold a persistent premium or discount to the last round for as long as leveraged traders are willing to pay funding to keep it there. Read the mark as a measure of positioning and belief, denominated in money changing hands, rather than as a price the company has raised at.

Mechanically identical to every other perp: above the venue reference, longs pay shorts; below it, shorts pay longs; charged on notional over the venue period. What differs is the anchor. Funding pulls OPENAI toward the venue's constructed reference, not toward a transactable price. It is still a real cost or credit to your position. A long held for weeks through positive funding pays for the privilege continuously, whether or not the company does anything in that time, and the three venues can fund the same name in different directions at the same hour.

OPENAI trades around the clock, because there is no underlying session to close. Leverage is deliberately low: Hyperliquid's io:OAI is isolated-margin only with a 6x cap as of September 2026, and Lighter and AsterDex set their own caps, shown on the ticket before you sign. Size is in points, so the dollar notional of a contract is the mark, and margin is notional divided by leverage. The reason to stay well under the cap is the repricing profile: a funding-round headline can move the reference by a large fraction in one print, at any hour, with no close to think in.

• Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Hyperliquid io:OAI: isolated margin only, 6x maximum
• Notional in dollars equals the mark in points, per contract

The listing risk on this instrument is not theoretical. EntropyIO's first OpenAI contract on Hyperliquid was registered and then delisted before it recorded a trade, and the market was later relaunched. A deployer can do that, and a venue can change its reference, its cap or its listing at its own discretion. A position on a pre-IPO perp is a position on a market that exists at the pleasure of whoever runs it, which is a different kind of risk from the price risk you are used to sizing for.

OPENAI trades on Hyperliquid, Lighter and AsterDex, each with its own reference, its own depth and its own funding. The marks differ, sometimes by tens of points, and the funding can lean different ways at the same moment. That is the case for picking the venue per order rather than per account: with all three marks and funding rates in one view you can choose the cheapest book to hold on your side, and the position stays on the venue that filled it.

A new funding round, a tender offer or an IPO filing puts a transacted number next to the perp's opinion, and the gap between the two closes fast, in whichever direction it needs to. If the company lists, venues differ: some keep the market open and switch the reference to the share price, others settle and delist. Holding through that event is holding through a regime change in what the contract tracks. Nothing about the position becomes shares, and the venue's policy decides what happens to it.

• Repricing risk when a transaction prints against the perp's mark
• Reference switch or settlement at listing, at the venue's discretion
• No conversion into shares under any scenario

OPENAI sits in the Pre-IPO tab of the markets list with every venue that carries it and each venue's mark, funding and leverage cap side by side. The ticket is the same one used for every other market: choose the venue, the side, the size in points and the leverage, and sign from your own wallet. Our fee is 0.05% of notional on venues that support an integrator fee, on top of the venue's own. The app starts new users with a $1,000 paper balance on the same screens, which is the right place to make a first pre-IPO trade.