Crypto traders are looking past SpaceX’s expected IPO price and placing a higher value on Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence company ahead of its trading debut.Perpetual futures, contracts that don’t expire, tied to SpaceX were trading around $165 on crypto venues Hyperliquid and Binance Thursday morning in New York, implying a valuation of roughly $2.2 trillion. The company is offering shares at a fixed price of $135 in its record-setting initial public offering. SpaceX’s IPO is set to price on Thursday. It has attracted demand for more than four times the available shares, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The terms of the offering are unlikely to change, people familiar with the matter said, meaning SpaceX would raise about $75 billion at a valuation of around $1.8 trillion. In the showdown between Musk fans clamouring for SpaceX stock at virtually any valuation and veteran investors like Jim Chanos calling it a “hopes-and-dreams IPO,” crypto-perps traders appear to be siding with the former — even though the price has fallen from above $200 in May.Interest in the perps has increased since they appeared to predict a blockbuster debut for AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. in May. Cerebras shares soared 68% on their first day of trading. Now SpaceX’s IPO — the largest ever by a wide margin — is putting the blockchain-based market’s predictive power to the test.Pratik Kala, a portfolio manager at the digital-asset hedge fund Apollo Crypto, pointed out that buyers of these contracts now would be wagering that SpaceX debuts with at least a 20% premium over the IPO price. “The SpaceX perpetual is setting a higher hurdle for traders entering the contract now,” he said. “Conversely, traders shorting the perp are effectively betting that the stock’s first-day trading will be tepid.”Perps have no legal claim on the companies they track and carry a variety of risks. Funding rates required to keep positions open, fluctuating liquidity, settlement rules and reference pricing data for external assets all contribute to the price of the contract. A sharp price move could therefore say as much about retail leverage or scarcity as about the company’s intrinsic value.None of this has detracted from interest in the products, and with SpaceX, volumes have soared. The average daily trading volume in Cerebras shares, conducted in the stablecoin USDC, was $3.6 million leading up to the IPO, according to Hyperliquid data. The SpaceX perps have averaged more than $26 million in daily volume since launching on May 18.That’s swelled to over $69 million over the past 24 hours, with roughly $145 million in open interest, according to the platform Trade.xyz, which offers the Hyperliquid-based SpaceX contracts.Binance has attracted even greater volumes, with over $182 million traded for the contract in the past 24 hours and $184 million in open interest.Predictive Power?Some industry figures have touted the perps market for its predictive power.OKX Chief Executive Officer Star Xu said on X on Wednesday that his exchange’s perps are “providing a real-time, transparent, and global market expectations and price discovery.”The SpaceX listing comes on the back of market euphoria around AI stocks, which have driven US markets to multiple highs this year despite geopolitical turmoil stemming from the war with Iran.Christophe Boucher, chief investment officer at ABN Amro Investment Solutions, compared SpaceX’s stock to cryptocurrency trading.“I see something very similar to crypto in the sense that, at worst, you lose 100%, but at best — imagine he’s right — it’s exponentially upward,” Boucher told journalists, referring to Musk’s predictions.Some analysts have noted that SpaceX is targeting an astronomically high price-to-sales ratio. With an estimated $29.7 billion in sales this year, the ratio would be 60 times annual revenue.Morningstar’s ValuationYet there is no other company quite like SpaceX. The listing is being pitched as a chance for public investors to buy into a firm offering satellite-based broadband internet, AI infrastructure and rockets that could eventually take humans to Mars.Lofty ambitions do not guarantee success, however. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens said his model assigns a 7% chance that SpaceX will achieve commercial viability for its Starship project, which aims to develop a fully reusable launch vehicle to supply orbital data centres. He values the company’s stock at $63 — less than half the targeted IPO price.The valuation is only part of the controversy around SpaceX’s public offering. The company has sought to debut on the Nasdaq just weeks after publicly filing its prospectus. It also involves super-voting shares designed to let Musk retain control of the rocket maker.Attention, though, is a lightning rod. On Hyperliquid, Binance and the growing number of platforms offering these products, the bets keep piling up.