😭 Ventuals is shutting down

First movers don't always win...

Jun 22, 2026

On today’s menu:

😭 Ventuals, the pre-IPO market on Hyperliquid, is shutting down
🚀 Plasma One is officially live

Ventuals shuts down

Ventuals built the first on-chain derivatives platform letting traders take leveraged positions on the valuations of private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

No shares, no paperwork, just synthetic exposure settled in stablecoins.

The idea sounded absurd a year ago, but it worked.

The platform traded over $650 million in volume and raised more than 500,000 HYPE since its late-2025 launch.

Then, on June 15, the team announced it was done.

Its OPENAI and ANTHROPIC markets were frozen at their trailing 24-hour average prices, halted for trading, and every vHYPE holder can withdraw their deposited HYPE at a 1:1 rate plus accrued yield.

No Ventuals token will ever exist.

The closure isn’t a failure story — Ventuals says it wasn’t shutting down due to losses; the team is folding into another project inside the Hyperliquid ecosystem, but that’s hard to believe – no one ever said they shut their business because it was making too much money.

TradeXYZ now controls roughly 95% of all HIP-3 pre-IPO volume on Hyperliquid — including a SpaceX market that correctly priced the company’s IPO pop weeks in advance.

Ventuals proved the market was real. It just didn’t win it – a rare warning that first-mover advantage isn’t always real.

Plasma One is Live

Plasma One is mobile stablecoin banking app with some cool features:

Zero-fee USDT transfers
A Visa card with cashback
Yield above 10%
Built entirely on Plasma’s own purpose-built Layer 1 blockchain rather than borrowed infrastructure.

That last detail is the whole strategy.

Plasma’s founder put it plainly:

“Stablecoins will not become part of everyday banking through another app sitting on top of someone else’s rails. They need a product that brings the entire experience together.”

Plasma owns the rails, the liquidity, the licensing, and the app — top to bottom. The only thiing it doesn’t yet own is the merchant – networks like Visa still dominate this and it will be difficult and costly for Plasma to push a blockchain payments terminal that anyone can use.

The product launched with three membership tiers tied to XPL, Plasma’s native token:

Lite – free, 2% cashback
Core – 3% cashback plus 5% on AI spending
Platinum (premium travel and AI rewards) — with early users getting Core free for a year, pegged at over $1,000 in value.

The XPL gating isn’t an accident: it’s a direct effort to inject real utility into the token, requiring holders to lock up to 100,000 XPL to access top-tier benefits.

During its private beta, card spending already crossed $9 million across 44,000 transactions and nearly 9,000 activated users — before the public rollout even happened.

The mission isn’t subtle: Plasma’s chief strategy officer framed it as giving someone the ability to download an app, onboard in minutes, and use digital dollars without ever thinking about blockchains, wallets, or banking rails.