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ChangXin Memory Technologies just pulled off China’s biggest IPO since 2010, raising 57.92 billion yuan, roughly $8.6 billion, on Shanghai’s STAR Market. But the real plot twist happened two weeks earlier, when a crypto platform nobody’s grandmother has heard of started letting traders bet on the outcome using perpetual futures settled in USDC on the Hyperliquid blockchain.
The IPO that broke records
CXMT listed on July 27 at a price of 8.66 yuan ($1.28) per share, representing roughly 10% of the company’s enlarged capital. The offering valued the chipmaker at approximately $85.5 billion before trading began, making it the largest A-share IPO since the Agricultural Bank of China went public more than fifteen years ago.
Then the market opened, and things got enthusiastic. Shares surged as much as 466% intraday on debut.
The $8.6 billion raise also makes CXMT’s listing the largest semiconductor IPO in Chinese history, surpassing SMIC’s $7.5 billion offering back in 2020. CXMT is currently China’s largest DRAM manufacturer by capacity and ranks fourth globally, putting it in direct competition with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.
Crypto’s pre-IPO futures experiment
On July 14, nearly two weeks before the actual listing, Trade.xyz launched a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract for CXMT on the Hyperliquid blockchain. The contract, trading under the ticker xyz:CXMT, debuted at a reference price of $5 per share.
It did not stay there long. The contract quickly surged to a peak of $8.64, implying a valuation of nearly $560 billion for CXMT. For context, that’s roughly six and a half times the company’s actual pre-listing valuation of $85.5 billion.
The contract offered up to 5x leverage, was settled entirely in USDC, and came with a critical caveat: no ownership rights, no dividends, no voting rights.
Why this matters beyond the novelty
Chinese A-shares are notoriously difficult for foreign investors to access. Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor programs exist but come with quotas, approvals, and paperwork. Stock Connect programs through Hong Kong help, but they don’t cover STAR Market listings on day one. For global traders who wanted exposure to what was clearly going to be one of the year’s biggest IPOs, the crypto pre-IPO contract was, functionally, the only game in town.
The gap between the implied valuation from the Hyperliquid contract (nearly $560 billion at peak) and CXMT’s actual pre-listing valuation ($85.5 billion) tells you something important about the product’s limitations. Thin liquidity in these early-stage crypto derivatives markets means price discovery is, to put it charitably, approximate.
The regulatory implications are still uncharted. Chinese securities regulators have not publicly commented on the existence of offshore synthetic derivatives tracking a domestic IPO, and it’s unclear whether these products would draw scrutiny from the SEC or other Western regulators if they gain traction with US-based traders.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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