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Crypto exchanges have spent years trying to blur the line between digital assets and traditional finance. Bybit’s latest move is one of the clearest examples yet of how far that project has come.
The Dubai-based exchange has launched pre-IPO perpetual contracts tied to two Chinese companies: Unitree, a robotics firm, and Moonshot AI, an artificial intelligence startup. Both contracts are denominated and settled in USDT, meaning traders gain price exposure to these private companies without ever holding the underlying shares. The move extends Bybit’s TradFi perpetuals lineup, which has grown to more than 200 products since its April launch and now spans equities, ETFs, commodities, indices, and pre-IPO names.
What These Contracts Actually Do, and What They Don’t
The mechanics are worth unpacking, because the term “pre-IPO perpetual” can obscure more than it reveals. A perpetual contract is a derivative with no expiry date. It tracks the price of an underlying asset through a funding rate mechanism, where long and short positions periodically exchange payments to keep the contract price anchored near the reference price. There is no delivery of shares, no shareholder rights, and no direct claim on the company.
What traders get is leveraged price exposure to a company that has not yet listed publicly. For Unitree, that exposure carries a concrete catalyst: China’s securities regulator approved the robotics firm in July for an initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR Market. The perpetual contract lets traders position ahead of that listing without going through the Chinese equity market. For Moonshot AI, the timeline to a public listing is less defined, making the contract a purer speculative instrument on private-market valuation.
The distinction between exposure and ownership matters especially for retail participants. These are derivatives built on private-company valuations that are, by nature, less transparent and less liquid than public market prices. The reference price Bybit uses to anchor the contract is not a live exchange quote but an estimated or indicative valuation, which introduces a layer of pricing uncertainty that does not exist with perpetuals tied to listed stocks or commodities.
Bybit Is Following a Pattern Already Set by Its Rivals
This is not Bybit acting alone. The broader crypto exchange industry has been moving steadily into private-market and pre-IPO products. Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken all rolled out SpaceX-linked contracts ahead of the company’s June listing, giving users pre-IPO exposure through crypto-native derivatives before SpaceX shares were available on any public exchange.
The competitive logic is straightforward. Crypto exchanges have large, active retail bases that are comfortable with derivatives and leverage. Traditional brokerages have historically gatekept pre-IPO access behind accreditation requirements and minimum investment thresholds. Crypto platforms are positioning themselves as the more accessible alternative, at least in terms of entry barriers, even if the risk profile of these products is anything but low.
For Malaysian and Singaporean traders, the relevant regulatory context is that neither Bybit nor Binance are licensed to offer derivatives to retail investors in Malaysia or Singapore in the conventional sense. Bybit operates from Dubai and its products are not approved by the Securities Commission Malaysia or the Monetary Authority of Singapore for retail distribution. That does not stop regional users from accessing these platforms, but it does mean there is no local regulatory safety net if something goes wrong with a contract’s pricing or settlement.
The Bigger Picture: Tokenized Stocks Are Gaining Ground Fast
Bybit’s pre-IPO perpetuals sit alongside a parallel trend in tokenized equities, which represent actual on-chain ownership of stock rather than derivative exposure. Data from RWA.xyz shows tokenized stocks have reached a distributed value of $2.38 billion across 1.31 million holders, with the holder count up 123.62% over the past 30 days. That is a sharp acceleration, and it reflects genuine institutional and retail appetite for bringing equity exposure into crypto-native infrastructure.
The two trends, pre-IPO perpetuals and tokenized stocks, are related but distinct. Tokenized stocks aim to replicate actual share ownership on a blockchain, with projects like Backed Finance and others working through regulatory frameworks in jurisdictions like Switzerland and the EU. Pre-IPO perpetuals are derivatives that sidestep ownership entirely. Both are attempts to capture the same underlying demand: investors want equity-like exposure through crypto rails.
Whether regulators in Southeast Asia will eventually carve out frameworks for either product category remains an open question. The SC and MAS have both signaled interest in tokenized assets broadly, with MAS in particular running Project Guardian to explore tokenized financial products in a supervised environment. But retail-facing pre-IPO derivatives from offshore exchanges sit well outside those supervised sandboxes for now.
The pace at which crypto exchanges are expanding into traditional finance territory is accelerating faster than regulatory frameworks can respond. For traders in Malaysia and Singapore who are drawn to products like Bybit’s Unitree or Moonshot AI perpetuals, the opportunity is real, but so is the gap in oversight. The exchanges are building the infrastructure; the question of who protects the user if the pricing model breaks down remains unanswered.
