Without an exchange license, market maker qualifications, or any endorsement from Wall Street, the on-chain market won. In May 2026, an AI chip company called Cerebras officially listed on Nasdaq. At the opening, the reference price given by the traditional pre-market platform Forge Global differed from the final opening price by 208%; another pre-market platform, Hiive, also had a deviation as high as 56%. However, on another market—the Hyperliquid chain—the Cerebras perpetual contract, which went live several days in advance, had a final error of only 3% from the opening price. In the IPO process, there is an almost insurmountable wall between ordinary investors and institutions. OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX—the fastest-growing technology assets of the past decade—were almost all born in the primary market. Silicon Valley VCs, Wall Street banks, and high-net-worth family offices entered the market when the companies were valued at billions; while when ordinary investors first had the opportunity to buy in, it was often on the day of the IPO—the valuation had already been pushed to hundreds of billions, and the first wave of gains had already been distributed. Pre-market trading was meant to be a supplementary mechanism, but its entry isn't open to everyone. Forge's threshold is an annual income of $200,000 or a net worth exceeding $1 million, while Hiive is a similar institutional club. This door is one that most people can never open in their lifetime. Hyperliquid is changing that. When Hyperliquid first launched, some voices in the crypto community said, "This thing is too much like traditional finance." But the irony of history is that past criticisms have now become the biggest barrier. As tokenized stocks, pre-IPO contracts, and commodity trading begin to emerge on-chain, the platform that "most resembles traditional finance" is precisely the one that first meets this demand. Hyperliquid is a high-performance blockchain designed specifically for derivatives trading, where all transactions, matching, and clearing are completed on-chain. Last October, it launched HIP-3, allowing any qualified developer to independently deploy and operate a perpetual contract market, defining the underlying assets, selecting price oracles, and setting parameter rules. Hyperunit, Hyperliquid's asset tokenization division, built Trade.xyz on top of this—currently the largest third-party application in the HIP-3 ecosystem, controlling over 90% of open interest and connecting on-chain matching capabilities to the most valuable off-chain assets: US stocks, indices, commodities, and the soon-to-be-launched Pre-IPO sector. In less than six months since its launch, Trade.xyz has accumulated over $110 billion in trading volume, with a peak single-day trading volume of $5.6 billion and over 45,000 daily active trading addresses. Of its top 30 trading markets, only 7 are cryptocurrency trading pairs, with the rest entirely from stocks, commodities, and indices.Behind this number lies a larger structural change: Hyperliquid is using the logic of traditional financial markets to do what traditional finance cannot—24/7, barrier-free, two-way game-based price discovery. This is the root cause of Cerebras' 3% error, as well as the root cause of the 208% and 56% biases. The problem with traditional pre-market markets is not technology, but structure. The structures of Forge and Hiive dictate that they can only be mirrors, not markets. Participants are uniformly buyers who "want to enter" and sellers who "want to exit," and prices are only pushed in one direction; the update frequency is also extremely low, one relying on an algorithm to output once a day, and the other driven by scattered transactions. Prices have no opportunity to be questioned, and naturally, no opportunity to be corrected. Trade.xyz's structure is completely different: it operates continuously 24/7, updating prices every 3 seconds, and any breaking news is reflected instantly. On a Saturday in February this year, the US and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran, the CME closed, and the daily trading volume of crude oil on Hyperliquid jumped from $21 million to $3.7 billion in a single day—at such times, on-chain is the only price discovery machine still functioning. Trade.xyz's contracts are purely perpetual synthetic assets, involving no real equity, and are cash-settled derivatives. This legal structure gives it far greater flexibility than traditional pre-market platforms, as evidenced by S&P Dow Jones' official authorization of the S&P 500 index for Hyperliquid perpetual contract trading. More importantly, it allows anyone holding USDC globally to participate, with no asset threshold, no geographical restrictions, and supports both long and short positions with leverage up to 50x—Asian retail investors, European hedge funds, and highly leveraged whales compete in the same open market, and any mispricing can be quickly corrected through arbitrage. Following the Cerebras debacle, Bloomberg began citing Hyperliquid's crude oil contract prices as the "most valuable benchmark," bringing on-chain pricing capabilities into the mainstream financial media's spotlight. Cerebras was the first case, but an even greater test is on the horizon. SpaceX, soon to be listed on Nasdaq, targets a valuation of $1.75 trillion and aims to raise $75 billion—if successful, it will surpass Saudi Aramco's record-breaking $29.4 billion IPO in 2019, becoming the largest stock offering in human history. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are leading the underwriting. SpaceX's pre-market contracts on Trade.xyz are already online, and on-chain transactions have pushed its market capitalization above $2 trillion. Macro analyst Citrini, upon seeing this figure, wrote: "Given how accurately the market valued Cerebras, Musk will undoubtedly become the world's first trillionaire.""This time, the conclusion is not yet finalized. But the market logic is already subtly shifting: institutional investors and macro traders are starting to use the Trade.xyz price as a benchmark before SpaceX's opening, just as they did with Cerebras previously. The pricing door, once only open to institutions, is being gradually pried open by the on-chain market. When the scale reaches a certain point, a sense of threat emerges. According to DefiLlama data, Hyperliquid's perpetual contract trading volume exceeded $171.9 billion in the past 30 days, historically accounting for over 75% of the entire on-chain perpetual contract market at its peak. The world's two major traditional derivatives market infrastructures—CME Group and the New York Stock Exchange's parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)—are starting to get restless. In May of this year, the two institutions pushed US regulators to strengthen their scrutiny of Hyperliquid, citing potential market manipulation risks and possible sanctions circumvention issues. A deeper concern is: similar to Hyperliquid…" The continued expansion of on-chain platforms in the absence of a unified regulatory framework could impact the existing derivatives market structure and pose cross-border compliance challenges. When a competitor begins to face regulatory pressure from giants, it often means that it has threatened the latter's core interests. Faced with this pressure from traditional finance, Hyperliquid did not react passively but was well-prepared. As early as February of this year, the Hyper Foundation allocated approximately $29 million to the independent non-profit Hyperliquid Policy Center, specifically for policy research and regulatory lobbying, led by former Blockchain Association policy head Jake Chervinsky. In May, the same week that CME and ICE formally exerted pressure, Hyperliquid co-founder and CEO Jeff Yan traveled to Washington to meet face-to-face with members of Congress. The talks focused on the CLARITY Act and the crypto regulatory framework, with the core objective of promoting the compliant implementation of on-chain derivatives trading markets in the United States. The exchange had two aspects: firstly, a technical introduction involving Hyperliquid. The policy center focused on two main points: first, the on-chain transaction architecture, global user needs, and its positioning as a financial innovation infrastructure; second, it provided a "first principles" explanation of DeFi and on-chain markets to help policymakers understand the relevant mechanisms and potential impacts. Jeff Yan later stated that he felt the "prudent but open" regulatory attitude of both parties in the US towards the crypto industry and believed that now was the policy window to push on-chain derivatives into the US regulatory system. The Policy Center also publicly responded to the accusations from the two exchanges: Hyperliquid's entire transaction record is on-chain and traceable, with transparency far exceeding any traditional financial venue. This transparency was precisely the core motivation for Jeff Yan to leave traditional finance and build on-chain markets.In his view, the problem with the traditional financial system has never been efficiency—it's that trust relies on intermediaries, the flow of funds depends on the judgment of a few, and ordinary people can never see the whole picture. Blockchain offers a possibility for the first time: replacing trust with code, making all accounts public on the chain, and allowing anyone to verify them in real time. The battlefield of this game has extended from the trading interface to Capitol Hill. In the past, IPO pricing was a game played in a closed room—price books, roadshows, institutional channels—ordinary people were always waiting outside for the market to open. Cerebras's 3% versus 208% victory proved for the first time with numbers that the door was not unopenable. SpaceX is about to ring the bell. A larger window of verification has opened. *This article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market is risky; invest with caution. [Conflux]