Issue 007: Hot IPO Summer

Issue 007: Hot IPO Summer

Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-202458360 Published: 2026-06-17T18:42:55.000Z Summary: A model ban, a perp monopoly, and the first signs of a hot IPO summer.

Subscribe Sign in

Discover more from Uninvited

Long reads, weekly intel, and interviews with the people moving private markets.

Over 3,000 subscribers

Subscribe

By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy.

Already have an account? Sign in

Issue 007: Hot IPO Summer

A model ban, a perp monopoly, and the first signs of a hot IPO summer.

Rosie and Wazz

Jun 17, 2026

8

Share

Hello to the uninvited.

This is Wazz and Rosie, welcome to Issue 007 of Uninvited.

This week:

• Washington switched off Anthropic’s two best models on Friday, which is awkward timing for their IPO.

• Binance has won the pre-IPO perp market.

• The secondary desks are quoting half the AI and defense complex, which is what the start of a hot IPO summer would look like.

• And this week’s funding rounds, from a $175M DeFi raise down to a fistful of seed cheques, all landed on the same two things: AI and fintech.

Subscribe

---

The race for pre-IPO markets

Binance is currently the main venue for pre-IPO perps.

With SpaceX no longer driving the category and Ventuals, the Hyperliquid-based venue, winding down, the market has narrowed quickly. The recent oracle issue leading to a $1.5M loss on Ventuals’ SpaceX market also showed how hard this product is to get right: these are liquid markets built around assets that were never designed to trade that way.

Ventuals@ventuals We are aware of an incident on our SPACEX market about an hour ago. The offchain data provider used as a component of the oracle price returned incorrect data, which caused the market’s oracle and mark price to move dramatically. This led to the liquidation of some user 5:44 PM · May 28, 2026 · 126K Views * * * 33 Replies · 16 Reposts · 191 Likes Hyperliquid, once one of the more visible venues in the category, is now absent from the current leaderboard. That leaves Binance with the deepest OpenAI and Anthropic markets today.

Coinbase 🛡️@coinbase Pre-IPO perps on Coinbase open up access to get exposure to early price discovery on top companies. SpaceX was the first. Anthropic and OpenAI are up next. 7:31 PM · Jun 16, 2026 · 112K Views * * * 37 Replies · 40 Reposts · 448 Likes Coinbase is now moving into the same lane. It started with SpaceX and says OpenAI and Anthropic are next.

The question is whether Coinbase can turn brand and distribution into real liquidity. Binance has the lead today, but Coinbase is one of the few venues large enough to make the race interesting.

---

Hot IPO Summer

If “hot IPO summer” becomes real, the first signs are already showing up in secondary quote flow.

Polymarket, Stripe, Kraken and Kalshi are leading activity over the last 30 days, while OpenAI, Anduril, Shield AI and Crusoe are also seeing consistent interest, according to our data from leading venues.

Thanks for reading Uninvited! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe

---

The million-percent gain

The Cursor deal makes the hindsight hard to ignore.

SpaceX agreed to buy Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, for $60B in stock, turning one of FTX/Alameda’s old private-market positions into one of the clearest missed upside stories of the cycle.

FTX’s estate sold what it had to sell, but the timing looks brutal in hindsight.

Stakes tied to Anthropic, SpaceX, Robinhood, Cursor and Genesis Digital have re-rated meaningfully since FTX first invested, with some of the biggest gains coming after the bankruptcy process began.

That is the strange part of the FTX estate story: underneath the collapse was a book of private-market exposure that, in another context, would now be one of the most sought-after portfolios in venture.

---

A model ban, right before the IPO

On Friday the US Commerce Department banned non-Americans, including Anthropic’s own staff, from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the company’s two best models. It cited export controls and national security. Anthropic shut both models off for everyone to comply.

nicolas, 30 ans@nic_carter I can’t believe Anthropic comparing their product to nuclear weapons 800 times backfired on them. I am shocked 2:37 AM · Jun 13, 2026 · 505K Views * * * 140 Replies · 768 Reposts · 18.3K Likes The timing matters because Anthropic is mid-IPO. Its S-1 leans on safety as the main advantage: the most careful lab earns the most trust and the most enterprise revenue. This is the first time a regulator has used that same positioning against the company.

The question for the IPO is whether investors read this as a one-off or a pattern. If the government keeps restricting Anthropic’s models, the safety moat starts to read as regulatory risk.

---

The week in private markets

The rounds worth noting this week.

Larger rounds:

• Morpho, $175M at a ~$2B valuation, co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto and Ribbit. The largest raise a DeFi protocol has done.

• Current, $80M Series E at a $1.5B valuation, led by Springcoast, with a16z and Tiger Global. Consumer fintech.

• Poetic, $50M Series A at a $500M valuation, backed by OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. AI agents.

• Minerva, $20M Series A, led by 8VC and Lingotto. Market analysis AI.

Seed and pre-seed:

• Enlaye, construction risk AI, $5M

• Soffi, collaborative dev environment, $4.6M

• Recess, kids activities marketplace, $4M

• Intellectible, AI proposal writing, $3M

• Sika, cross-border settlement, $2M

• BeatpulseLabs, multimodal AI training data, $1.8M

• Onedosh, stablecoin payments, $1M

Most of the week’s capital went to AI and fintech infrastructure.

---

The Uninvited Interview

How the kids who grew up trading JPEGs will rewrite venture

This week we sat down with Oliver Morris. He DM’d a Bitcoin developer at 12, made Rare Pepes at 13, still brokers six-figure NFT deals at 23, and is now eyeing a move into venture.

To us he reads as a preview of the first generation that learned markets before jobs, and liquidity before cap tables. Hand them a private share they can’t price, sell, or transfer without clearing three gates, and the honest reaction is just: why. They won’t ask permission to enter markets, because they never learned that markets required it.

Read the full interview here.

Follow Oliver at @official_coder.

---

If you’re raising, allocating, or sitting on a position that suddenly feels less stable than it did last week, hit reply and tell us what you’re seeing. We read every one.

Uninvited

If you’re new here, you can subscribe for free below.

Subscribe

8 Likes

8

Share

A guest post by Wazz shadowy super speculator https://x.com/WazzCrypto Subscribe to Wazz

Discussion about this post

Comments Restacks

Top Latest Discussions

Issue 004: How GPs Read Founders, Where Scarcity Moved, and Polymarket Pricing SpaceX

Six methods from a private dinner, an LP on venture capital's new scarcity, and a $2.3 trillion price set by prediction markets before the bankers got…

May 27•Rosie and Redphone

17

Issue 003: Wall Street's New Doors, the $2T Moon Mission, and an Hour with Talok Capital

Welcome to Issue 003 of Uninvited.

May 20•Rosie and Wazz

11

1

3

Issue 005: Anthropic Joins the Race & the Crowd’s Pricing Faster Than the Bankers

Hello to the uninvited.

Jun 3•Rosie,Wazz,and Redphone

11

2

See all

Ready for more?

Subscribe

© 2026 Uninvited · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice

Start your Substack Get the app

Substack is the home for great culture