Crypto traders price India telecoms company Reliance Jio's IPO at about $110 billion

Crypto traders are already betting on the largest IPO in India’s history, putting a $110 billion price tag on Indian telecoms giant Jio Platforms as its official three-day public subscription gets underway.

The JIOUSDT perpetual contract on Bitget traded near $12 on Thursday. For comparison, the company set a maximum bid price of 1,119 rupees ($11.79) per share. The company is expected to have about 9.21 billion shares outstanding after the sale, valuing it at most around 10.3 trillion rupees ($106 billion).

Jio Platforms is the telecom and digital business of Reliance Industries, one of India’s biggest conglomerates. Its Jio network started up in 2016 and a decade later is the largest mobile operator by subscriber numbers. The IPO, which seeks to raise about 302 billion rupees, is the largest in India’s history, overtaking Hyundai Motor India's 279 billion-rupee initial share sale in 2024.

The Bitget contract became available on Oct. 14. Since then, it has traded between $11.48 and $12.24. Volume over the period totals about 369,000 JIO, or roughly $4.4 million, providing a live valuation for a stock that has not yet listed.

This isn’t the first time that an impending IPO has found a market on crypto platforms. Perpetual contracts on SpaceX SPCX and Cerebras (CBRS), for example, traded on TradeXYZ, a platform on the Hyperliquid network, ahead of their stock market debuts.

The contracts show how price discovery for big IPOs is starting to take place on crypto platforms, even before the first share trades. They’re not always accurate, though. For SpaceX, synthetic perpetual futures on Hyperliquid and Binance traded around $162-$165, implying a valuation of $2.2 trillion. The company’s official IPO valuation was almost 20% lower at $1.8 trillion.

It’s worth remembering that a pre-IPO contract is a perpetual future, a bet on price with no expiry date, tied to a company that is not yet on the stock market. Holders do not get shares, votes or dividends, only exposure to the price.

Traders post USDT, a dollar-linked stablecoin, as collateral to take a leveraged bet in the pre-IPO contract. Bitget says the contract is “based on publicly available information, such as announced IPO pricing ranges or the final offering price.”

Bitget says it will convert the contract into a standard perpetual once the shares list. If the IPO is delayed, repriced or canceled, the contract can move sharply.