SpaceX went public on June 12, priced its shares at $135, and raised a record $75 billion in the process. The implied valuation landed somewhere between $1.77 trillion and $1.8 trillion, making it the kind of IPO that rewrites the record books.
Multiple crypto exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, and Bitget, had promoted tokenized access to the SpaceX IPO through xStocks, a service linked to Kraken and its parent company Payward. The pitch was simple and intoxicating: crypto-native investors could get exposure to the hottest IPO in years without navigating legacy brokerage accounts. More than $1 billion in customer orders poured in. Then, on June 14, the cancellation notices arrived.
xStocks couldn’t secure the shares. Every single order was cancelled, and full refunds were issued.
What went wrong with xStocks
xStocks needed to acquire real SpaceX shares on Nasdaq and then represent them as tokens on crypto platforms. When the IPO was massively oversubscribed by both institutional and retail investors on the traditional side, there simply weren’t enough shares to go around.
