To hunt the truth, one must first bury the hype.
When I first read the news that Bybit had added Unitree and Moonshot AI to its pre-IPO perpetuals lineup, my instinct wasn’t to celebrate the expansion of crypto derivatives. It was to pause and ask: what price discovery mechanism can possibly underpin a contract that references a private company’s valuation? The answer, as I’ve learned from years of dissecting narrative-driven markets, is rarely satisfying.
Let me give you the context. Bybit, a top-tier centralized exchange, now boasts over 200 TradFi perpetual products — covering stocks, ETFs, commodities, indices, and private companies. Unitree, a Chinese robotics firm, and Moonshot AI, a large language model startup, are the latest additions. On the surface, this looks like a natural evolution: tokenized real-world assets meeting crypto liquidity. But peel back the layers, and you find a product that relies on something far more fragile than a smart contract.
The Core Narrative Mechanism
What Bybit has done is not technically novel. Pre-IPO perpetuals are essentially cash-settled CFDs (contracts for difference) wrapped in a familiar crypto interface. The user deposits USDT as margin, trades a synthetic price tied to the company’s implied valuation, and profits or loses based on price movements. No on-chain logic, no oracle, no decentralized governance. It’s CeFi doing what CeFi does best: packaging old concepts into new forms.
But the narrative is where the real value lies. Unitree and Moonshot AI sit at the intersection of two of the hottest global technology themes: artificial intelligence and robotics. Both are private, high-growth, and perpetually in the news. For a crypto trader who missed the early-stage venture deals, this product offers a perceived “pre-IPO access” — a chance to speculate on the next SpaceX or OpenAI before they go public. The FOMO is real, and Bybit is banking on it.
From my experience auditing DeFi protocols during the 2020 liquidity mining boom, I’ve seen how quickly narrative can outpace fundamentals. The same dynamic applies here. The perpetual’s price is not derived from an open market but from an index provider or an internal pricing model. The opacity of private company financials — no SEC filings, no quarterly earnings, no analyst coverage — means the price is largely a function of sentiment and news flow. This is not a variance; it’s a structural flaw. I’ve written about the utility token fallacy before; now we have the private company perpetual fallacy — a belief that a derivative can create price discovery where none exists.
The Contrarian Angle: Decentralization’s Hollow Promise
The prevailing narrative is that Bybit’s move is a step toward financial inclusion, allowing retail traders to access private markets. But I see a different story: one where the core tenets of crypto — transparency, trustless verification, and decentralized governance — are completely absent. The index that prices Unitree’s perpetual is likely a black box. Trades are settled on Bybit’s internal order book, not on a public blockchain. The user must trust that Bybit has priced the contract fairly, that the liquidation engine won’t fail during volatility, and that the exchange won’t manipulate the index.
This is a regression, not progress. In 2021, I wrote about Soulbound Tokens as a way to bring identity and reputation on-chain, precisely to avoid the centralized gatekeeping that plagues traditional finance. Pre-IPO perpetuals, by contrast, reinforce the very gatekeeping they claim to bypass. The data availability layer is not a blockchain; it’s a private server. The DA is overhyped in the rollup space, but here, the lack of any DA at all is the real risk.
Furthermore, the regulatory angle cannot be ignored. Under the Howey test, these products bear strong resemblance to unregistered securities derivatives. The user invests money (USDT) into a common enterprise (Bybit and the index provider) with an expectation of profit solely from the efforts of others (the management of Unitree and Moonshot AI). That’s a textbook definition of a security. I’ve tracked institutional narrative integration for years, and I can tell you that the SEC, CFTC, or even Chinese regulators will eventually take notice. The product exists in a gray zone, and gray zones often turn red.
The Behavioral Economics Trap
Let’s talk about the psychology. The human brain is wired to overvalue rare opportunities. The phrase “pre-IPO” triggers a Pavlovian response: exclusivity, high returns, insider access. But the pricing of these perpetuals is inherently unstable. Private companies rarely have a single, universally accepted valuation. Their value changes with each funding round, media report, or product launch. The perpetual price must somehow track this opaque signal, but with no transparent oracle, the feedback loop is noisy.
I recall the 2022 bear market, when I retreated to review my own biases. The Cost of Belief article I wrote then was about the emotional toll of investing in assets that lack fundamental anchors. Pre-IPO perpetuals amplify that risk. A trader bullish on Moonshot AI might see a 10% drop due to a rumor about a competitor — and the perpetual price could cascade, triggering liquidations, even if the company’s actual prospects haven’t changed. The fragility of sentiment-driven markets is well documented in behavioral economics. As I often say, code doesn’t lie. Narratives do. Check the blocks. But here, there are no blocks to check.
The Sustainability Question
Bybit’s product line now exceeds 200 perpetuals, making it a leader in the TradFi-to-crypto bridge. But quantity is not quality. The sustainability of these products depends on three factors: liquidity, regulatory tolerance, and the continued hype of the underlying companies. Unitree and Moonshot AI are hot now, but what happens when the AI narrative cools? Or when one of them faces a regulatory setback in China? The perpetual could become a ghost market, with wide spreads and no volume.
Based on my audit experience with centralized exchanges, I’ve seen that product breadth is often a proxy for customer acquisition cost. Bybit is likely trying to differentiate itself from Binance and OKX by offering assets that others cannot. But the moat is shallow. If Binance decides to launch similar products, the advantage evaporates. The real risk is that the entire pre-IPO perpetual category becomes a race to the bottom on fees, with no sustainable value capture for the platform or its users.
The Forward-Looking Takeaway
So, what does this mean for the crypto market? In the short term, expect more exchanges to follow Bybit’s lead. The narrative of “RWA on-chain” will be enriched by these pre-IPO derivatives, but the fundamental tension remains: traditional institutions do not need your public chain. They need a compliant, liquid, and transparent market. Bybit’s product, while innovative, is none of those things.
I predict that within six months, we will see either a regulatory action against one of these products (most likely in the US or EU) or a major price dislocation event that exposes the fragility of the index mechanism. The survivors will be those who build on-chain verification, not just another CeFi wrapper. Until then, treat these perpetuals as what they are: high-beta bets on narrative waves, not long-term investments.
To hunt the truth, one must first bury the hype. And the hype around pre-IPO perpetuals is buried deep in the same soil as the 2017 ICOs — a promise of access without accountability.