MNX launches pre-IPO futures for OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Oct 13, 2026, 16:00 UTC

On October 13, 2026, MNX, a trading platform built on the MegaETH blockchain, went live with pre-IPO futures contracts covering three of the most prominent AI companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. The launch was reported by CoinDesk and coincided with separate coverage of how Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft are approaching enterprise clients, including a report that Anthropic has begun embedding engineers directly at customer sites and a critical piece arguing that all three companies are misreading what enterprise buyers actually need.

The MNX launch matters because it creates a speculative market for companies that have not yet gone public, letting retail and institutional traders take positions on the future valuations of AI's biggest names before any IPO pricing exists. By running on MegaETH, the platform inherits whatever liquidity and speed characteristics that blockchain offers, but it also ties the credibility of these contracts to a crypto infrastructure that carries its own regulatory and counterparty risks. At the same time, the enterprise coverage running alongside this story points to a genuine tension inside the AI industry: firms like Anthropic are making expensive bets on deep client integration while critics argue those firms have fundamentally misjudged what large organizations want from AI vendors.

None of the three camps, Pro-AI, Anti-AI, or Middle Ground, have published reactions to this story yet. Pro-AI voices would typically welcome pre-IPO futures as a sign of market confidence in AI's long-term value, pointing to demand for exposure to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic as validation of the sector's trajectory. Anti-AI voices would likely raise concerns about speculative instruments layering crypto risk onto already uncertain AI valuations, arguing it amplifies hype without grounding prices in real fundamentals. A Middle Ground perspective would probably focus on what the futures pricing reveals about market expectations while cautioning that neither the AI companies nor the blockchain platform have fully proven their models.

The most concrete things to watch are whether any of the three named companies comment on or seek to limit trading in these contracts, how MNX futures prices move relative to any private funding rounds or IPO filings, and whether financial regulators in relevant jurisdictions treat these instruments as securities requiring oversight.