(Bloomberg) — For years, crypto firms have argued that blockchain technology could create markets for private companies long before they reach Wall Street. SpaceX provided the industry’s biggest test yet. The results were mixed.
Ahead of the largest IPO in history, perpetual futures tied to Elon Musk’s rocket company gave traders a live – and ultimately accurate — gauge of investor sentiment days before the Nasdaq opened, largely converging on where the stock would ultimately trade. But attempts to sell tokenized SpaceX shares themselves stumbled after several exchanges failed to secure enough stock to satisfy overwhelming demand, forcing refunds instead.
The episode highlighted an important distinction: Creating a market for a stock turned out to be easier than creating ownership of it. The implications extend beyond SpaceX. OpenAI, Anthropic and other blockbuster listings are expected to follow, giving crypto repeated opportunities to prove it can offer investors earlier access to private markets — even if ownership remains harder to replicate than trading.
Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures, which never promised ownership of SpaceX, generated more than $1.3 billion in trading volume on listing day alone, becoming the platform’s second-most active market after Bitcoin. Volume has slowed to around $290 million in the past 24 hours.
“It’s an unfortunate lesson learned for those who expected an allocation,” said Christopher Perkins, chief executive officer of 250 Digital Asset Management. “But, across crypto, pre-IPO perps once again demonstrated their utility as an important tool for early market access and price discovery.”
For much of the week before SpaceX’s public debut, the perpetual contract traded inside what became the stock’s first-day range despite bouts of sharp volatility. By the time the company opened on Nasdaq, the crypto market had already compressed toward the opening price, offering a public, around-the-clock view of investor expectations before traditional trading began.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, opened about 11% higher and closed its first day at $160.95, valuing the company at roughly $2.2 trillion and making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. The shares jumped another 15% to $184.69 on Monday.
Luca Parlamento, portfolio manager at D2 Finance, said the contracts were never meant to predict where SpaceX would ultimately trade. Instead, they gave investors a way to express views before public markets established an official price. Once Nasdaq opened, the perpetual contract adjusted to that new reference point.
“The SpaceX premium was not a forecast,” said Parlamento. “It was exposure that re-priced the second a cash market existed to re-price against. That is what pre-IPO perps actually are: a place to hold the opening basis until the bell.”
The appeal is straightforward. Perpetual futures let investors trade expectations for companies they cannot yet buy in public markets. They create a liquid market for price expectations without requiring delivery of the underlying shares. That transparency was itself a departure from traditional finance.
The harder challenge emerged elsewhere. Binance, Bybit and Bitget Wallet all canceled planned distributions of tokenized SpaceX shares after xStocks failed to secure enough underlying stock to meet customer demand, forcing the exchanges to refund users. Kraken, which acquired xStocks, said it received only a partial allocation. All these platforms also offered perps on the stock. The episode underscored a limitation that blockchain technology alone cannot solve. Tokenizing a share still requires someone to obtain the share first.
Bloomberg reached out to Binance, Bybit, Bitget Wallet and Kraken for comment. Kraken and Bitget Wallet both reiterated information shared on their public statements.
“We understand from xStocks that the team made every effort to secure the allocation, but it ultimately wasn’t available as expected,” a spokesperson of Bitget Wallet said. “We are in active communication with xStocks to understand the full circumstances and will share further updates as they become available.”
The interest on private markets was not consistent across the board within crypto. Ventuals, one of the first startups that launched pre-IPO trading on Hyperliquid, said on Monday that they were sunsetting the project. The trading volume on Ventuals in the past 24 hours was at around $5.4 million, according to data compiled by a Dune Analytics user. Alvin Hsia, co-founder and CEO of the firm, told Bloomberg News that they were closing the project because the firm was acquired.
“These pre-IPO perps do give an excellent real-time sentiment and 24/7 price discovery for names like SPCX, or Cerebras last month, but they’re not reliable predictors of listing prices or thereafter,” said Adam McCarthy, head of research at London-based crypto trading firm LO:TECH.
Rather than producing a single winner, the SpaceX IPO became the clearest real-world comparison yet between competing approaches to bringing equities onto blockchains. Perpetual futures proved they could create continuous price discovery before public markets opened. Tokenized shares came closer to replicating ownership, but remained constrained by the same scarcity of underlying stock that governs traditional finance.
Together, they offered a preview of how crypto’s role in equity markets may evolve as more high-profile private companies prepare to go public.
–With assistance from David Pan.
(Adds company comment in the bottom portion of the story. Updates prices.)
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