Entropy能成为第二个Trade吗？Pre-IPO的竞争之战已打响

Original Author: diogenes (X)

Original Translation: TechFlow

TechFlow Editor's Note: Entropy's HIP-3 prediction market has taken the spotlight as soon as it launched. As an investor, the author was initially excited, believing this was one of the cleanest launches seen from new founders recently; its Anthropic market open interest surged from a few hundred thousand dollars to nearly $3 million. But skepticism quickly followed — "They're just trying to be another Ventuals." On the surface, this logic seems airtight: others have tried before and failed, so what makes you special? However, the author argues: before Hyperliquid, no one had truly challenged centralized exchanges, and it was precisely the design differences of HLP and Hypercore that rewrote the ending. Subtle innovations in the details often determine success or failure.

Entropy's recent launch has been nothing short of impressive. As an investor, I feel incredibly excited — I believe this is one of the most successful launches I've seen recently, especially for a new venture in the crypto space. Entropy's Anthropic market open interest has surged from a few hundred thousand dollars to nearly $3 million at the time of writing, far surpassing any other market I've seen. However, not everyone views this launch positively.

Aside from Jake Paul's controversial tweet (which unsurprisingly drew some criticism), an interesting take I've heard on Twitter is: "Oh, these guys are just trying to be..." @ventuals "all over again." Naturally, people think: "Oh, this approach has been tried before and it didn't work — what makes them think they're so special?"

At first glance, this logic seems sound. Einstein once said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." However, ignoring the nuances reflects a profound ignorance. There are countless examples where this line of thinking is completely wrong. Before Hyperliquid, no DEX had ever truly challenged centralized exchanges.

DEXs had been improving over time but still faced limitations. Many people thought the same would hold true for Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid fundamentally changed the game because its design allowed for sustainable liquidity bootstrapping via HLP, and Hypercore's infrastructure was scalable enough to support the trading volume required by a major exchange. There are many other differences between Hyperliquid and its predecessors, but these two are its core innovations.

The key point is this: details matter, and seemingly minor changes can have a significant impact on outcomes.

Now, let's look at Ventuals' problems, because there are many. Ventuals focused on the pre-IPO phase, but its timeline extended far beyond what an IPO would require. Ventuals' Anthropic market launched in November 2025, at a time when Anthropic hadn't even filed for an IPO yet.

This led to a massive divergence between Ventuals' market prices and the actual prices in Anthropic's secondary market. Given that Anthropic's underlying asset supply is limited (i.e., it's hard for people to buy), and Ventuals' underlying assets were sourced partly from the secondary market and partly from other channels, this meant that funding rates in Ventuals' market were extremely volatile — most notably, funding rates once spiked to as high as 8,700%!

These funding rates were not arbitraged away because holders of the underlying market didn't trust Ventuals' design, believing its markets failed to reflect the true value of these assets. This created a vicious cycle: the market offered something that resembled Anthropic but wasn't quite Anthropic, was highly volatile, and carried extremely high holding costs. Combined with an inability to attract liquidity providers, this led to most of Ventuals' markets being acquired by Trade.

Now let's look at Entropy. Entropy launched its Anthropic market the month after Anthropic filed its S-1; according to Fortune, the IPO is currently expected in October. Depending on precisely when in October, that's anywhere from one and a half to two months away. This window falls within a somewhat forgotten chapter of Hyperliquid's history — what I like to call the "pre-market wars."

During the "market wars" period before token listings, exchanges like Hyperliquid fiercely competed to gain first-mover advantage by opening trading for new tokens before they were widely distributed. By launching markets first and offering the best liquidity, exchanges could become the dominant venue once the token officially listed. This meant the majority of trading volume would flow through these exchanges, generating massive profits. As a result, exchanges were even willing to operate at a loss to secure control over a market — just like Costco sells hot dogs at a loss to draw more customers in, who then buy other profitable items. Here, the "hot dog" is pre-listing liquidity, and the "other items" are post-listing trading fees.

With few exceptions, Hyperliquid emerged as the outright victor of the pre-market wars. While it obviously didn't become the world's largest exchange, that's not the point. It went from a relatively unknown small exchange to a top-four exchange, largely thanks to the pre-market wars. It captured significant market share by launching earlier and offering more liquid markets than its competitors. This relied heavily on HLP itself, and entities that wanted to harm Hyperliquid or profit from it (usually both) employed various tactics to manipulate prices or directly target HLP itself (list of events). Yet, despite these challenges, Hyperliquid persevered and has become the most valuable project of the past five years — and possibly the greatest project since Bitcoin itself.

Hyperliquid's natural next step was to allow traditional asset markets. As the world's leading economic superpower and issuer of the preferred reserve currency, the United States holds the lion's share of these assets, and its regulators have historically been active, ready to send warning letters to any project deemed to even slightly touch US companies or prices. Therefore, after consolidating its dominance over crypto assets, Hyperliquid would naturally want third-party decentralized teams to manage these markets while leveraging Hyperliquid's existing infrastructure and user base. However, Hyperliquid did not provide support via HLP; any new team had to create liquidity on their own.

Trade was the first to deploy HIP-3 at scale and the first to truly leverage liquidity. @sershokunin Trade successfully launched multiple stock markets and rapidly scaled liquidity through partnerships and trader distribution channels. Trade launched in mid-October 2025. As of November 6, Trade's XYZ100 (a Nasdaq 100 index product) had surpassed $1 billion in trading volume, and today its open interest and daily trading volume both stand at billions of dollars.

While Trade flourished, Ventuals' products underperformed. Ventuals often beat Trade to market, yet failed to capture sufficient market share, only to see its share eroded further when Trade launched competing products.

Trade's core innovation and competitive advantage lie in its extensive collaboration with market makers and traders to ensure volume, while also tweaking some mechanics of how its markets operate to bring them closer to "economic gravity" — meaning its markets better reflect the true prices of assets.

Entropy operates on two core principles: first, providing more direct liquidity (e.g., an HLP-style model) is beneficial to the long-term health and robustness of its markets; and second, building partnerships with distribution partners will become increasingly important. Liquidity and stability are paramount. This is also reflected in its design, which stands in stark contrast to Ventuals — particularly regarding funding rates: Entropy's funding rates trend toward 10%, while Ventuals' funding rates grew exponentially.

In theory, these differences in approach and design should allow Entropy to more effectively help markets price stocks accurately. This should also give both longs and shorts confidence that their positions won't get liquidated due to funding costs in these illiquid pre-market venues (where, if traders are forced to close positions due to slippage, they suffer losses and risk becoming prey for other traders).

Whether Entropy can win the pre-IPO competition depends, first, on whether they can build public confidence in their model and markets — which will likely require consistent execution and close collaboration with traders to ensure they feel comfortable using their markets. Second, it depends on whether they can price/market-make on their own or through partners, attempting to introduce an HLP-style model for pre-IPO trading — something that has yet to be deployed at scale within HIP-3.

If so, we may see a second truly successful HIP-3 market, and perhaps a genuine competition with Trade in emerging markets and advancing the HIP-3 ecosystem.