Bybit Built a Market for Companies That Are Not Public Yet
Crypto exchange Bybit is letting traders speculate on the value of Unitree Robotics and Moonshot AI before their shares begin normal public trading. The new instruments are not stocks, tokenized shares or claims on either company. They are USDT-settled pre-IPO perpetual contracts whose prices are created inside the derivatives market. That distinction makes the product both interesting and unusually speculative: traders can price a future public company before the public stock market has established its real share price.Unitree and Moonshot AI can now be traded without owning their shares
Bybit added pre-IPO perpetual contracts linked to Chinese robotics company Unitree and AI developer Moonshot AI, according to Cointelegraph. Both products are denominated and settled in USDT, giving traders exposure to changes in the companies' implied valuations without transferring any equity ownership.A long position can benefit if the synthetic price rises and a short position can benefit if it falls. What the trader does not receive is more important: no voting rights, dividends, shareholder protection or direct claim on the company's assets.
Bybit is effectively separating price speculation from ownership. A private company can remain private while a parallel crypto derivatives market starts debating what that company should be worth.
The price exists before a real public share price does
The unusual part is price discovery. Before an IPO there is no continuously traded public Unitree or Moonshot AI share that a perpetual contract can simply track. Bybit therefore uses an estimated share structure and allows market trading to create an implied valuation during the pre-IPO phase.For Moonshot AI, Bybit's official listing announcement uses an estimated 1 billion shares and explicitly describes the instrument as leveraged exposure to Moonshot AI's estimated valuation. The contract is settled in USDT and supports up to 10x leverage.
This means the pre-IPO quote should not be confused with an official company valuation or future IPO price. It is a tradable market estimate built from expectations, positioning and liquidity inside Bybit's own derivatives venue.
The gap between speculation and reality can be enormous
Pre-IPO perpetuals introduce a pricing problem that normal stock futures largely avoid. With Apple or Nvidia, traders can compare a derivative directly with a liquid underlying share. With a private company, the eventual number of shares, IPO valuation and listing price may still change before the company reaches the exchange.Bybit acknowledges that risk in its pre-IPO product framework. When official share information becomes available, the exchange can adjust or rebase the contract to the actual capital structure. After an IPO, a contract may transition to a normal stock perpetual using conventional market pricing.
Until then, the spread between the synthetic contract and the eventual public share price can become substantial. The derivative is therefore closer to a continuously traded prediction about valuation than to ownership of a private-company security.
Bybit has built more than 200 TradFi derivatives in four months
Unitree and Moonshot AI are part of a much larger expansion. Bybit says its TradFi perpetual lineup has grown to more than 200 products since the platform launched the category in April, spanning listed equities, ETFs, commodities, indices and now private companies approaching an IPO.That growth shows how aggressively crypto exchanges are moving beyond native digital assets. A trader can increasingly use the same USDT balance to speculate on Bitcoin, technology stocks, commodities and the implied value of companies that have not yet entered public markets.
The boundary between crypto derivatives and traditional finance is therefore becoming less meaningful. The exchange infrastructure remains crypto-native, but the underlying stories increasingly come from Wall Street, private equity and global technology markets.
Unitree is an especially volatile candidate for this experiment
Unitree is preparing for a public-market debut while simultaneously facing geopolitical uncertainty. The Chinese company is known for humanoid and quadruped robots and has become one of the most visible names in China's robotics boom.The United States recently tightened restrictions on new foreign-made advanced robotic devices. Reuters reported that the measures are aimed largely at Chinese suppliers and can prevent new or previously unauthorized models from receiving the approvals required for U.S. sales. Existing Unitree models that already obtained authorization are not automatically removed from the market.
For a pre-IPO perpetual, that uncertainty is fuel. IPO demand, U.S. restrictions, new robot launches and regulatory decisions can all move a synthetic valuation before investors ever get a conventional listed share to compare it with.
Private markets are becoming a new battleground for crypto exchanges
Bybit is not alone in trying to turn private-company demand into a tradable crypto product. Exchanges have experimented with contracts linked to companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, reflecting strong retail demand for technology businesses that traditionally remain inaccessible until an IPO or require specialized private-market access.Perpetual contracts solve the access problem in a very particular way: they do not provide access to the company at all. Instead, they create a separate financial instrument that can rise or fall with expectations surrounding the company.
That model is attractive because it is liquid, familiar to crypto traders and available around the clock. It is also much riskier than the phrase "pre-IPO stock" might suggest, especially when leverage is added to a price that has no live public equity market beneath it.
Bybit is monetizing the period before price discovery becomes real
The most interesting part of the product is the timing. Before an IPO, information is scarce, private valuations are intermittent and ordinary investors have few mechanisms for expressing a view. Bybit is turning that uncertainty itself into a market.For Unitree and Moonshot AI, traders can now build long and short positions before conventional exchanges establish a public price. Once the IPO arrives, reality can force the synthetic market to converge, rebase or sharply reprice.
That is why these contracts should be understood for what they are: not early shares, but leveraged bets on what future shares might eventually be worth. Crypto exchanges have effectively found a way to start the IPO speculation before the IPO exists.
Editorial Team - CoinBotLab