Crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private artificial intelligence companies on earth — such as Anthropic — that ordinary investors have almost no other way to access. | BLOOMBERG

The race to sell retail investors a piece of the artificial intelligence boom has gone mainstream — closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles (SPVs). Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth — ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access.

The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX — in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage.

Ventuals and PreStocks, two crypto venues riding that shift, have seen their trading activity — measured by open interest and market value combined — surge more than threefold since the start of the year to last month.…