Bybit Now Lets Retail Traders Play Pre-IPO Games That Used to Be Reserved for Venture Capital

Bybit just added Unitree Robotics and Moonshot AI to its pre-IPO perpetuals lineup, giving retail crypto traders access to positions in private companies before they ever hit a public market.

That alone would be notable. But zoom out and the real story is bigger: Bybit's TradFi perpetuals catalog has quietly crossed 200 products, spanning equities, ETFs, commodities, indices, and private companies. This is not a crypto exchange dabbling in traditional finance. This is a full hybrid trading platform, and most of the industry hasn't caught on yet.

Why Unitree and Moonshot AI Matter

Unitree is one of the most talked-about robotics companies in Asia, known for its viral humanoid and quadruped robots that have circulated endlessly across tech Twitter. Moonshot AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence startup backed by serious venture money and widely watched as a potential breakout name in the global AI race.

Neither company is public. That's the entire point.

Bybit's pre-IPO perpetuals let traders take leveraged positions on private valuations before an IPO locks in a price. If either company goes public at a premium, traders positioned early could capture moves that previously only angels, VCs, and institutional allocators could access.

This is the financialization of private markets, running on crypto rails.

The 200-Product Milestone Nobody Noticed

Bybit did not make a loud announcement when it crossed 200 TradFi perpetual products. There was no campaign, no countdown, no press event. The catalog just grew, quietly and steadily, until it became something that rivals would struggle to replicate overnight.

For context, most crypto exchanges still treat TradFi exposure as a novelty, offering a handful of tokenized stocks or synthetic indices as a side feature. Bybit has turned it into an infrastructure layer.

The lineup now covers enough asset classes that a trader could, in theory, build a diversified portfolio of global macro exposure, private company bets, and commodity plays, all without leaving a single crypto-native platform.

What Traders Should Watch

If Unitree or Moonshot AI files for an IPO in the next 12 to 18 months, the perpetuals market on Bybit will become a real-time price discovery mechanism that traditional finance simply does not have. Watch the funding rates on both contracts closely. Elevated positive funding would signal retail is aggressively bullish on a pre-IPO pop.

More broadly, if competitors see Bybit's 200-product TradFi catalog gaining traction with users, expect Binance, OKX, and others to accelerate their own hybrid product rollouts.

The race to become the Bloomberg Terminal of crypto just got a very serious frontrunner.