BitStern

Anthropic just wiped over $550 BILLION off its own implied valuation in 24 hours by publishing one notice. > Anthropic is the AI company behind Claude. It is still private. It has not filed for an IPO. > Its last official funding round in February 2026 valued the company at $380 BILLION. The round was led by GIC and Coatue, with Microsoft and Nvidia among the investors. > Annualized revenue ended 2025 at $9 BILLION. By February 2026 it was $14 BILLION. By April it had passed $30 BILLION. > The numbers were big enough that everyone wanted exposure. Everyone except Anthropic, who had no interest in letting their shares be traded freely. > A gap opened up between the official $380 BILLION valuation and the price buyers were willing to pay on secondary markets. By early May, that secondary valuation had passed $1 TRILLION. > Whenever there is that much money chasing one company, the products to deliver exposure appear quickly. > Traditional pre IPO marketplaces like Forge Global and Hiive. Specialist brokers like Sydecar and Upmarket. Older private market structures called SPVs. And crypto platforms like PreStocks, issuing tokens on Solana that claimed each token represented one Anthropic share. > Here is where the math gets strange. > At Anthropic's actual $380 BILLION valuation, a single share is worth between $259 and $346. The PreStocks token traded at $911 in mid April. It peaked at $1,409. > The token was pricing Anthropic at three to five times what the company was officially worth. Even at its lows. > Token holders never owned any actual stock. The product was officially listed as a "bearer digital asset with no legal rights in Anthropic." No equity. No voting rights. No dividends. > Then on May 11 Anthropic published an updated notice. Any sale or transfer of its stock, or any interest in its stock, without explicit board approval is void. Not voidable. Void. The transfer never legally happened. > The notice named eight firms specifically. Open Door Partners. Unicorns Exchange. Pachamama. Lionheart Ventures. Sydecar. Upmarket. And new offerings on Forge and Hiive. > It covered SPVs, forward contracts, tokenized securities and any fund claiming indirect access. > Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro flagged the word "void" as the most aggressive legal stance Anthropic could have taken. In Delaware court, void means the trade never existed in the first place. The buyer has no rights, no recourse, and no place on the company's books. > The PreStocks token fell 34% from peak. The implied valuation collapsed from $1.5 TRILLION to roughly $950 BILLION. > Over $550 BILLION in synthetic market cap vanished from products that were never backed by approved shares to begin with. The product was always synthetic exposure to a company that never agreed to be exposed. Today Anthropic made the legal status of that exposure clear. The valuation on screen was never real. The losses are.

GM

Ord io is shutting down on June 1. Three years ago, we launched our idea for "an Ordinals explorer with upvotes". We had no idea what was about to happen. Since then, Ord io has grown into a platform used by over a million people to explore inscriptions on Bitcoin. It brought us so much joy to ship features like Satributes for discovering the rare sats behind inscriptions and Block Vision for monitoring real-time Runes minting activity. Even simple filters and sorting options took on a life of their own. "Sort by largest inscription" quickly turned into a leaderboard where inscribers competed to create the biggest "four megger". And even the things that annoyed us at the time are funny to look back on now, like when the Bitcoin Puppets community would "raid" other collections so hard that we had to remove the downvote feature. To help preserve some of the Bitcoin culture that happened on Ord io, we'll be uploading the full history of upvotes, replies, and public address profiles to GitHub. That way, if someone wants to build their own Ordinals explorer with this context in the future, they can. Thank you to every single artist, collector, dev, and degen who joined us for this ride 🧡