Hyperliquid traders price Unitree near $38B against a $9B IPO valuation

2 min read•Aug 15, 2026•

Unitree Robotics’ Shanghai IPO has drawn Hyperliquid bets implying a valuation near $38 billion, first reported by Coindesk. That gap matters because the contracts do not grant shares, and leveraged positions can be liquidated when the public stock establishes a reference price even if the debut is strong and above the IPO price.

Unitree priced its Shanghai STAR Market offering at 150.80 yuan ($22.37) per share, valuing the company at roughly $9 billion. Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO perpetuals traded between $92 and $94, equivalent to a valuation of about $38 billion.

Pre-IPO perpetuals let traders take leveraged long or short positions without an expiration date, but they provide no ownership and cannot be converted into actual shares. They create a synthetic market for speculation before listing, with prices expected to converge toward the public stock once a reference market becomes available.

A wide gap leaves leveraged traders exposed

Allium said the two Unitree markets, operated by Trade.xyz and Paragon, had accumulated $9.1 million in open interest and about $59 million in turnover. When both markets were active, the contracts traded just 1.6% apart on average.

The mismatch is the story: a strong stock-market debut can still be a bad outcome for leveraged long positions. An opening around $45, double the IPO price, would still be about 52% below the current perp price and could liquidate roughly 33% of long exposure; a $128 opening, nearly 6x the IPO price, could liquidate an estimated 53% of short positions.

Positioning on Trade.xyz, the larger market, is almost evenly split, with $6.5 million long and $6.6 million short. Smaller traders were more bearish: bets below $50,000 were 70% short by value.

Allium reported that Unitree, founded in Hangzhou in 2016, makes four-legged and humanoid robots for research, industrial and consumer applications. Revenue reached $253 million last year, up 335%, while humanoid robot shipments topped 5,500.

The offering was reportedly 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail traders, with trading expected to begin between Aug. 17 and Aug. 21. “Any open away from today's price forces one side of this market out,” Allium said.

Aug 31, 2026

Meta agrees to teen limits in settlement costing up to $17B

Meta has reached a settlement with attorneys general from 47 states over allegations that it illegally manipulated children’s attention, first reported by Newyorker. The agreement could cost the company up to $17 billion and would change how Facebook and Instagram handle teen access through age verification, daily limits and nighttime restrictions.

Meta did not acknowledge wrongdoing. The Oakland trial turned on whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects providers from liability for user-posted content, should also shield the algorithms that shape what users see; the plaintiffs argued that it should not.

The states presented evidence that senior executives, intent on maximizing the company’s growth, repeatedly set aside concerns about what Meta’s products were doing to its youngest users. A former Meta engineer testified that the chance of a teen encountering violent or graphic content was between a hundred and four hundred times higher than what the company acknowledged publicly.

Meta also spent more than two billion dollars on legal defense in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Under the agreement, Facebook and Instagram will remove the like count on posts, do more to verify that users are at least thirteen years old, limit service to two hours a day for teenagers and restrict service entirely for those users during nighttime hours.

The settlement was quickly compared with the tobacco lawsuits of the nineties. But Meta is a trillion-dollar company increasingly invested in artificial intelligence, and the agreement applies to only a single facet of its sprawling operations. The deal places a striking financial cost alongside product changes focused on teen users.

New technologies are being disseminated ever more quickly, while the machinery of politics and law delivers accountability intermittently and at a painstaking crawl. It took more than a decade of worrying about how teenagers used Facebook and Instagram for a legal settlement to enforce a change in Meta’s behavior.

Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, stayed away from the lawsuit, arguing that it did not go far enough. After the settlement was announced, he said, “We’ll see them at trial.”