21shares Launches Europe’s First Anthropic Pre-IPO ETP

Pre-IPO meets ETP: On Tuesday, crypto-native ETP issuer 21shares listed its Anthropic Synthetic ETP (CLAU) on the Vienna MTF, a trading venue operated by Wiener Börse. The product gives investors synthetic economic exposure to the valuation of Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, using prices from crypto markets. Like any other ETP, it can be held in a regular securities account.

• Why it matters: Companies are staying private far longer than they used to. U.S. companies now go public at a median age of 12 to 14 years, against five to six in 1999 and 2000, so most of their value growth goes to venture funds and institutional investors before retail investors can buy in at the IPO. Crypto firms have tried to close that gap, from pre-IPO perpetual futures on exchanges such as Binance to tokenized products from players like Ondo. 21shares takes a third route and packages the exposure as an ETP, which requires neither a crypto exchange account nor a wallet.

How it works: This third route, however, still runs through the first one, as CLAU ultimately draws its exposure from pre-IPO perpetual futures on crypto exchanges:

1. Investors buy a certificate issued by 21shares x FalconX Limited, a new special purpose vehicle (SPV) that 21shares set up for synthetic products.
2. The SPV passes the investors’ money on to FalconX, the crypto prime broker that acquired 21shares in 2025. As a debt instrument, the note obligates FalconX to repay Anthropic’s current price whenever an investor redeems.
3. To cover that commitment, FalconX buys pre-IPO perpetual futures on Anthropic, contracts that track the company’s expected valuation.
4. Because Anthropic has no listed share price, data provider Kaiko calculates the reference price that CLAU tracks, based on trading in Binance’s Anthropic perpetuals contract.

After the IPO: CLAU will not convert into Anthropic shares once the company lists, which according to Bloomberg could happen before the end of November. Instead, the perps’ reference price will switch to Anthropic’s listed share price, and the product will keep trading as a synthetic tracker of the stock.

A young market: For now, CLAU depends on a market that is only a few months old. Binance launched its Anthropic contract on 2 June 2026, and open positions in it were worth around $42.5 million on Thursday, a small amount for a company valued in the trillions.

• “The perps market is still relatively young, with limited market depth in certain areas, which can lead to higher volatility, wider spreads and larger tracking deviations,” Adrian Fritz, Chief Investment Strategist at 21shares, told Blockstories.

What investors pay: Fees open a second, more predictable gap between CLAU and its reference price. Investors pay a 1% annual management fee and a 2% exit fee, and they also carry the funding cost of the perpetual futures behind the product, a payment that long holders such as FalconX make to the other side every eight hours. 21shares deducts these payments from CLAU’s net asset value, so all investors share them.

A separate track: These early limitations are part of why 21shares treats CLAU as new territory and largely as an experiment. The issuer has kept the product away from its physically backed crypto ETPs and placed it in the new SPV instead.

• “We launched a second SPV to bring new, innovative products to market, starting with CLAU. One reason is to clearly separate our physically backed crypto ETPs from derivative-based products, allowing investors to better understand their different structures and risk profiles,” Fritz said.

The FalconX factor: That 21shares can offer such a product at all goes back to FalconX’s acquisition. Since the deal closed in late 2025, the two firms have spent close to a year combining 21shares’ ETP issuance and distribution with FalconX’s trading and derivatives capabilities.

• “With FalconX’s expertise in derivatives and perps trading, CLAU was a perfect example of where we can work with our parent company. Anthropic is only the first example, and over time we could also bring further pre-IPO products or yield-generating vaults to market through regulated instruments that traditional investors already understand,” Fritz added.

Outlook: 21shares has not yet committed to specific launches. For now, it is focused on widening CLAU's reach, as the product trades only on the Vienna MTF, a venue many banks and brokers are not connected to.

• “Vienna MTF was the quickest to support us in bringing CLAU live. While it is a smaller trading venue, we want to cross-list CLAU on larger European exchanges as soon as possible, so even more investors can access it,” Fritz said.

The pressure: BlackRock and Fidelity have turned spot bitcoin and ether into a scale business at fees of 0.15% to 0.25%. IBIT alone holds $66.4 billion of the $106 billion in US spot bitcoin ETFs, and even in Europe, where crypto-natives still lead on assets, BlackRock took $525 million of the $1.16 billion in first-half net inflows.

The response: The four largest crypto-native issuers are differentiating along two routes: differentiated ETPs and onchain investment strategies.

• Bitwise and CoinShares are building onchain asset management. Bitwise acquired staking provider Chorus One, curates Morpho vaults and introduced automated portfolios of tokenized stocks (ATPs). CoinShares this week announced yield strategies inside Safe wallets.
• Meanwhile, 21shares and Grayscale are expanding into differentiated ETPs, from 21shares’ synthetic Anthropic product to Grayscale’s staking and Zcash ETFs. CoinShares has also entered active management through its acquisition of quant manager Bastion, while 21shares plans to follow.

The bigger picture: U.S. and UK regulators have shortened the path to market, with generic listing standards, staking inside US ETFs and the reopening of crypto ETNs to UK retail investors creating new opportunities for differentiated ETPs. At the same time, tokenization provides a multi-year structural tailwind for onchain asset management. Most of these products are still small, though, and 21shares chief executive Russell Barlow expects “consolidation in the medium term”, especially for the long tail of ETP issuers.

Claude Donzé is Principal and Consumer Lead at Greenfield Capital, a leading European crypto VC firm with investments in companies such as Near, 1Inch and Arweave.

Which other onchain exposures could institutions offer through regulated wrappers?

Vaults are the most concrete area of institutional interest we’re seeing, and some are already exploring how to offer onchain yields to clients. However, for many, launching such a product only makes commercial sense at $50–100 million in expected AUM.

Beyond vaults, perpetuals could underpin more pre-IPO products tied to companies like OpenAI, SpaceX or Revolut, potentially followed by products resembling a pre-IPO index. Other possibilities include leveraged single-stock exposure and synthetic markets for prices without liquid futures markets, such as compute or bandwidth.

Further out, even prediction-market positions could be wrapped into regulated products. Some specialized firms are already exploring this, although I don’t expect to see concrete launches anytime soon.