Regarded by the industry as "NVIDIA's strongest challenger," Cerebras debuted on Nasdaq today.
Cerebras opened at $350, with an IPO price of $185. It surged to a high of $385, a premium of over 108% above the IPO price of $185 per share, triggering a circuit breaker on its strong first day of trading.
While the astonishing premium surprised many, traders found that the Pre-IPO Perp on the TradeXYZ chain was the most accurately priced platform in the Cerebras trading ecosystem, surpassing various traditional Pre-IPO platforms.
What Has the Pre-IPO Perp Disrupted?
Before diving into comparisons, let's first talk about Cerebras's IPO opening price.
On May 4, Cerebras filed an amended S-1 with the SEC, with an initial price range of $115 to $125. This was the first public number given by the underwriting team composed of Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Barclays, and UBS.
On May 8, the price range was revised to $125 to $135. On May 11, it was further raised to $150 to $160, and the number of shares increased from 28 million to 30 million. On the night of May 13, the final price was set at $185. On May 14, it opened directly at $350.
Now, let's look at those platforms.
First up is Forge Global, a professional institution widely used in the private secondary market, which appears to have the worst pricing.
Forge is currently one of the world's largest private equity secondary trading markets, listed on the NYSE, serving institutional investors, VCs, and accredited individual investors. Its core product, "Forge Price," is an algorithmic pricing model that integrates secondary market transactions, financing round information, and platform order book data, considered one of the most authoritative price references in the private market.
Access to Forge requires accreditation as a qualified investor, with an annual income threshold of $200,000 or a net worth exceeding $1 million. This is not a place where an ordinary person can enter.
The price trend of Cerebras on Forge is clearly seen from the chart: starting from around $20 per share in 2023, stabilizing in the range of $30 to $40 in early 2025, rapidly rising in early 2026 following funding news. On May 12, the day before the IPO pricing, the final Forge Price reading was $113.50, corresponding to a valuation of $292.6 billion.
With Forge Price at $113.50, the deviation from the closing price of $311 is already 174%, not to mention the opening price of $350.
Now, turning to the more active secondary market Hiive. Hiive's positioning is similar to Forge, but it focuses more on active trading matching. The user profile is closer to high-net-worth individual investors and small VCs, with a higher trading frequency compared to Forge. Looking at the price trend chart from Hiive, the price of Cerebras on Hiive is updated more frequently, and the fluctuations are more intense.
The final transaction price disclosed by Hiive was $224.93, labeled as the "Final Hiive Price," which was the last effective price on the platform before Cerebras went public.
At $224.93, it is much closer to the Forge price of $113.50, but still has a 38% deviation from the closing price of $311 and a 56% difference from the opening price of $350.
The reason Hiive's numbers are more accurate than Forge is that its transactions occurred later and more intensively, capturing more market sentiment close to the IPO. However, it is still a one-way market, only offering real equity trading without a short mechanism and without 24/7 continuous matching.
Let's now take a look at TradeXYZ.
Launched on May 1, with an initial reference price of $175, a maximum leverage of 5x, and open to anyone globally holding a USDC wallet, allowing both long and short positions.
Within two weeks, the on-chain Pre-IPO Perp's trading price remained stable in the range of $288 to $320. At 10 p.m. on May 14, three hours before Nasdaq officially opened for retail trading, the CBRS on-chain contract price quickly surged from the $290 range to $380, with an hourly trading volume approaching $100 million. The total trading volume in 24 hours was $2.8 billion, with an open interest of $57.77 million, making it the platform's fourth-largest active stock contract.
Some may say that TradeXYZ was just lucky this time, and the accurate pricing was just a coincidence.
But this rebuttal overlooks a more important fact: TradeXYZ's accurate pricing was not accidental but rather structural.
Why TradeXYZ's Pricing is More Accurate
To understand why TradeXYZ's pricing is more accurate, one must first understand why the pricing power of a traditional IPO has been monopolized by investment banks for so long.
The operation of the traditional IPO pricing mechanism relies on a core premise: all judgments about "how much this company is worth" must be aggregated through the investment bank's book-building process.
CEOs and CFOs travel to major financial centers, meet all major institutional investors within two weeks, tell the company's story one-on-one, and gather indications of interest. All these indications flow into the book controlled by the underwriters.
No one knows how much Fidelity bids, how much BlackRock subscribes to, or what Tiger Fund's indication price is. The investment bank is the only one who can see the whole picture.
This asymmetric information creates the bargaining power of the investment bank. They can set the price at a level that "clears the order book but leaves enough institutional first-day gains," which is an art. With a book-building oversubscription of 20 times, indicating that all institutions know $185 is low; however, the investment bank locks this information and still sets the offer price at $185. Institutions harvest 89% of the first-day gain at the opening, ready to participate in the next roadshow.
However, when there is a 24/7 running on-chain market, open to anyone, allowing short positions, and real-time visibility of all positions, price information no longer needs to be aggregated through a book-building process.
The higher the barrier, the worse the pricing. The more open, the more accurate the pricing.
TradeXYZ allows anyone worldwide to participate, with no asset threshold, no geographical restrictions, and no invitation system. Every transaction, every order placed, is a participant openly expressing their judgment of Cerebras' value in real money.
This means TradeXYZ's price aggregation incorporates a much broader information set than a roadshow, reflecting not just institutional judgment but the judgment of all market participants aware of this IPO opportunity. More information sources mean a closer proximity to true value.
At the same time, the shorting mechanism makes price manipulation more challenging.
Forge and Hiive are fundamentally one-way markets. Sellers are employees or early investors looking to cash out, while buyers are accredited investors bullish on the company. No one can openly bet against "I think this company is overvalued" — because the channel for shorting simply doesn't exist.
This creates a systematic bias: in a one-way market, the price can only be driven by upward pressure, with no outlet for bearish sentiment, resulting in a systematically optimistic price.
TradeXYZ allows shorting. Anyone believing Cerebras is overvalued can open a short position with margin and express their judgment with real exposure. This two-way game is a necessary condition for price equilibrium, with the tug-of-war between longs and shorts making it harder for price to be dominated by a single emotion.
Most importantly, Forge Price updates once daily, being an output of an algorithmic model rather than real-time market transactions. Hiive's trades are discrete, possibly taking days to execute. During the roadshow, the investment bank releases a price signal to the market every few days, each time selectively disclosed.
TradeXYZ is a continuously operating matching market, updating prices every 3 seconds. For example, news of Sam Altman featuring in a roadshow video, rumors of Arm and SoftBank attempting to acquire Cerebras, and the inquiry book's oversubscription multiplier increasing from 10x to 20x leads to immediate price movements.
This year's PreIPO frenzy has only just begun.
Cerebras is just the first. Later this year, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all preparing to go public. This will be the largest batch of tech IPOs in human history, with total fundraising potentially exceeding a trillion dollars.
And this also means that Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ will continue to disrupt Wall Street's understanding and have more pricing power.
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