MNX, built by former Manifold Markets executives, went live Tuesday with futures contracts on private AI valuations—OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and Moonshot. The platform raised $6.4 million in June with Village Global leading the round.
OKX and Bitget already offer AI company futures, but MNX's structural advantage is clear: contracts expire end of 2027 with zero funding fees. Perpetuals never expire and bleed traders through recurring fees on illiquid, stale price feeds.
Stephen Gruggett, Manifold Markets co-founder, cut to the core problem: perpetual futures on illiquid private companies are easy to manipulate, carry unpredictable funding rates and don't behave as traders expect. Dated contracts with hard settlement dates eliminate that chaos.
MNX sets prices through on-platform trading activity—no external oracle. On expiration, settlement uses publicly available valuations from funding rounds, investment funds or secondary markets. If those fail, MNX determines the price itself under a published review process. That final lever matters: traders could settle at prices diverging from actual private-transaction valuations.
Traders can use up to three times leverage on positions.
MNX currently blocks U.S. customers but is pursuing the licenses needed for domestic operations, according to Gruggett.
The exchange plans to expand beyond company valuations into AI economy markets—revenue, employment, housing, supply chain and computing capacity. Max Killberg of Village Global noted that AI infrastructure spending alone hits $800 billion this year and exceeds $1 trillion next year among U.S. hyperscalers, yet financial infrastructure around AI remains underdeveloped.
