Pre-I.P.O. Bets on Anthropic Arrive on the Vienna Stock Exchange

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Anyone who wants to bet on Anthropic can now do so ahead of its I.P.O., and in Vienna of all places: The crypto E.T.P. provider 21shares has launched Europe’s first pre-I.P.O. product on Anthropic. The 21shares Anthropic Synthetic ETP, ticker CLAU, is listed on the Vienna MTF, the multilateral trading facility of the Vienna Stock Exchange. It tracks the implied valuation of the Claude maker ahead of its planned stock market debut. It does not, however, contain any Anthropic shares.

How the Product Works

Instead of real shares, 21shares uses a structure borrowed from the crypto world:

• Underlying: The E.T.P. tracks the Kaiko Anthropic USD Reference Rate, an index from the crypto data provider Kaiko. Its daily reference price comes from the Anthropic perpetual futures on the crypto exchange Binance, derivatives with no expiry date that traders use to bet on Anthropic’s valuation.
• Structure: Exposure runs through total return swaps, with no leverage. The counterparty is FalconX, the crypto prime broker that owns 21shares. The issuer is a dedicated special purpose vehicle called 21shares x FalconX Limited.
• Costs: The annual fee is 1 percent, and there is a 2 percent exit fee. According to the product page, financing and trading costs of the perpetual futures may come on top.
• After the I.P.O.: The E.T.P. does not convert into shares and is not settled. Instead, the reference price will then follow Anthropic’s official share price, and trading in Vienna continues.

The product is still tiny. At launch, it managed about $49,000 (about €44,000), according to the product page, and a unit cost just under $9.90 (about €8.80). The E.T.P. is not offered in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan, and in Switzerland and Britain only to professional investors.

The E.T.P. can be bought through banks and online brokers that offer access to the Vienna MTF. On its product page, 21shares lists a long line of European brokers that carry its E.T.P.s. They include DADAT Bank and easybank in Austria; comdirect, ING, Flatex, Scalable Capital, Smartbroker, justTRADE and finanzen.net zero in Germany; and international platforms such as Trading 212, Degiro, eToro, Interactive Brokers, Saxo Bank and Swissquote. Investors should check case by case, however, whether CLAU can already be traded with a given broker.

“Traditional investors who want to take part in this value creation face a growing access problem,” said Duncan Moir, president and chief investment officer of 21shares. The company is applying tools from the world of digital assets to alternative investments, he said.

What Anthropic Is Supposed to Be Worth

Anthropic is preparing one of the largest I.P.O.s in history and has already filed its prospectus. How high the valuation will be is still open. In early September, the Binance futures that the E.T.P. tracks pointed to a valuation of about $1.93 trillion (about €1.72 trillion), Trending Topics reported. That was twice the valuation of the most recent funding round. On regulated secondary markets such as Hiive and Forge, where real employee shares change hands, implied valuations at the time ranged from $830 billion to $1.2 trillion.

Anyone buying CLAU is thus buying in at an implied valuation of about $2 trillion (about €1.79 trillion). The Anthropic contract on Binance currently trades at about $2,007. Binance assumes an estimated one billion Anthropic shares, so $1 of contract price equals $1 billion of valuation. That is a little more than double the valuation of the latest funding round, the Series H, which valued Anthropic at $965 billion (about €859 billion). The share count, however, is only an estimate by Binance: Anthropic has not set either the number of shares or an offering price. If the actual share count differs, the implied valuation shifts accordingly.

Criticism and Risks

The product has no connection to Anthropic. 21shares itself stresses that the E.T.P. is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Anthropic. Anthropic recently warned generally against third-party offerings: Anyone selling stakes through forwards or tokenized securities is either committing fraud or offering a product that may be worthless, the company said. The E.T.P., however, holds no shares at all and only tracks the price of derivatives.

The risks lie elsewhere. Because there is no public share price, the price of the Binance futures reflects only traders’ expectations. The product also depends on FalconX as counterparty, which 21shares discloses as a potential conflict of interest. The valuation itself is contested, too: The research firm New Constructs called the reported path to a $2 trillion valuation the “most ridiculous I.P.O. of 2026.” According to the product page, the gap between the valuation before and after the I.P.O. “can be significant in either direction.”

Other Routes to Pre-I.P.O. Bets

Other providers also want to give retail investors a stake in A.I. companies that are not yet listed. Besides the perpetual futures on Binance and the decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, the platform PreStocks sells tokenized stakes on Solana that it says are backed by special purpose vehicles. In 2025, Robinhood issued tokens on OpenAI and SpaceX in Europe, from which OpenAI promptly distanced itself.