Anthropic’s non-existent blockchain shares are tripping up investors

Crypto investors keep making mistakes with their Anthropic investments, from paying 8,700% funding rates to buying tokenized securities of non-existent shares.

Indeed, a lawyer for Anthropic just clarified that, despite promises by promoters of blockchain tokens, it never legally transferred shares that supposedly back many tokens like perpetual contracts (perps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), real world assets (RWAs), and memecoins.

Blockchain doesn’t fix stupid, and very few crypto AI investors were smart enough to read the fine print before purchasing.

Anthropic, the multi-hundred billion dollar maker of Claude AI, updated its webpage today to reiterate that unauthorized share transfers are void.

The post states plainly, “Any sale or transfer of Anthropic stock, or any interest in Anthropic stock, that has not been approved by our Board of Directors is void and will not be recognized on our books and records.”

The company named special purpose vehicles, forward contracts, and tokenized securities as offending asset classes. In essence, it told retail buyers to assume that many crypto tokens bearing Anthropic’s name are nonsense.

PreStocks, a Solana-based platform offering tokenized Anthropic exposure, enjoyed a 6X rally for its ANTHROPIC token over the past year from $235 to an all-time high of $1,409 shortly before the statement.

ANTHROPIC then crashed by 34% within hours of Anthropic’s legal notice and was still cratering as of writing time.

ANTHROPIC tokens were never Anthropic shares

PreStocks, as its name suggests, marketed its product as pre-stock tokens “1:1 backed by SPV exposure to the underlying company shares.”

The catch was in the fine print, with the word “exposure” holding a comical amount of weight.

As investors learned this week, any actual share is recorded on Anthropic’s corporate ledger and only inside a legal entity, not on a blockchain.

PreStocks’ Solana-based ANTHROPIC token “exposure” was a database entry pointing to a contractual claim on an SPV that didn’t have Anthropic’s permission for subsequent transfers or resales.

Blockchain tokens on secondary markets like PreStocks were never Anthropic shares.

Crypto attorney Gabriel Shapiro noted that the company picked the most aggressive language available under Delaware corporate law. Treating transfers as void rather than voidable further stripped secondary buyers of equitable defenses.

Anthropic’s notice insists that real share transfers require board approval.

Tons of places to buy fake shares

Anthropic’s list of unauthorized intermediaries named names.

Offending resellers included Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama, Forge, Lionheart Ventures, Sydecar, Upmarket, Open Door Partners, Hiive. Many investors who bought Anthropic exposure through these entities is not, in the company’s view, an actual stockholder.

Podcaster Gwart highlighted the reckoning for crypto’s stupidity. “If you make an $NFT of an Anthropic share and then Dario’s lawyers write a cease and desist letter destroying that share, you still have that share if it’s on the blockchain. What $NFT is doing to the concept of asset, few understand.”

The joke writes itself. An $NFT can point to any contract, including a nonsense contract.

Thanks to leveraged degeneracy, Anthropic-branded crypto tokens implied Anthropic valuations well above $1 trillion, almost triple the $380 billion valuation at which the company raised its Series G three months ago.

Protos has documented the parallel speculation on Hyperliquid’s Ventuals perpetual contract. Traders there paid up to 8,700% annualized funding last weekend to be long Anthropic. Like many crypto traders, they were not buying actual shares in Anthropic.

OpenAI told crypto investors the same thing

Anthropic is following a script OpenAI wrote. In its policy published last November, OpenAI declared that any attempted transfer of its equity without corporate consent is void.

The notice explicitly names tokenized interests in its equity, or in an SPV holding that equity, as the kind of arrangement that can be unwound.

Protos has previously covered OpenAI’s public disavowal of Robinhood’s tokenized OpenAI shares last year. OpenAI’s rejection landed two days after Robinhood unveiled its product at the Ethereum Community Conference.

The pattern is obvious. Private-company tokenizations like NFTs and RWAs can replicate the user experience of trading a share, but it doesn’t necessarily replicate legal ownership of a share, which remains a mostly offline, off-blockchain contract.

A token moves peer-to-peer in seconds. The underlying private security, by contract and corporate law, only moves with the issuing company’s permission.