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Crypto Platforms Sold Users on SpaceX IPO Access. The Tokenized Stocks Never Arrived

Crypto platforms may not be the best options for getting IPO allocations.
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Some crypto users thought they had found a way into the hottest IPO in years through tokenized SpaceX stock offerings. Instead, users of Binance Wallet, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet were told that the tokenized allocations would not arrive because xStocks, the tokenized equity provider behind the products, could not deliver the underlying assets.

Binance Wallet announced its SPCXx IPO Campaign on Thursday, saying eligible users could participate in a “non-guaranteed subscription process” for SpaceX tokenized securities through xStocks. Bybit kicked things off even earlier. On June 7th, the exchange introduced SpaceX as the first offering on its IPO Express product, telling users they could “participate in the SpaceX IPO subscription using crypto and gain early access before spot trading begins,” with registration and subscription running from the 7th to the 11th. In a June 9th blog post, Bitget Wallet also told users, “Now, on Bitget Wallet via xStocks, you can access tokenized stock exposure to SpaceX!”

However, when SpaceX actually went public on Friday, the crypto allocation mechanism broke. Bybit told users on Friday that “due to the xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets,” it did not receive any allocation, so no subscribed SpaceX allocations would be issued. The exchange said users would receive automatic refunds, plus an additional reward calculated at a 10% APR over a fixed four-day period. Binance canceled its own SPCXx campaign the same day, saying all locked USDC would be fully refunded and that it would distribute $1 million worth of bStocks SpaceX tokens, called SPCXB, equally among campaign participants by June 18th. Bitget Wallet also announced a full refund for their affected users.

CoinDesk reported that xStocks and its partners gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders tied to SpaceX access, and according to The Defiant, Binance’s SPCXx campaign alone attracted $557 million in on-chain subscriptions before being unwound with no allocation distributed. For what it’s worth, Wu Blockchain reported on community feedback that indicated customers at crypto exchange Kraken appeared to fare a bit better, with those who subscribed receiving a little over four shares’ worth of tokenized SpaceX exposure, despite initially requesting much more than that.

To be clear, the allocation crunch was not entirely unique to crypto. SpaceX’s IPO was wildly oversubscribed, and traditional brokerage customers also faced limits. Reuters reported that retail investors chased the offering in huge numbers after SpaceX reserved a record 20% of the deal for individual buyers. According to Barron’s, many customers at traditional financial institutions received fewer shares than they requested, though Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi all said at least partial allocations for eligible or qualified participants were completed.

Users of Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet, and Bybit were clearly not so lucky. Traditional IPO access is already hard to get, especially for a massive, high-profile deal like SpaceX. Trying to get that access through a crypto exchange or wallet, which then relied on another centralized party to secure and deliver the shares, added another link in the chain. In this case, that link appears to be where the offering broke.

New Crypto Tech, Same Old Middlemen

Even crypto industry insiders found the xStocks role as an effective middleman in the allocation transactions to be problematic. “Maybe tokens should actually be approved by the issuer and therefore be the actual underlying share. Just a thought,” Tom Farley, who is the CEO of crypto exchange Bullish, posted on X. “Couldn’t agree more!” added Don Wilson, who is the CEO and founder of longtime crypto liquidity provider Cumberland.

ARK Invest’s Lorenzo Valente hinted that there could be an issue relatively early on Friday, posting, “I’ve seen 40 exchanges and wallets advertising SpaceX stock. What exactly am I buying?”

It’s also worth noting that not every tokenized SpaceX product failed to launch. In fact, xStocks’s own SPCXx token did go live after the IPO, despite customers at the aforementioned crypto platforms getting left out in the cold. CoinGecko’s broader SpaceX stock page listed tokenized SpaceX products at a combined market cap of nearly $50 million at the time of this writing, with SPCXx accounting for roughly half of that. Of course, this is barely a drop in the bucket when considering SpaceX’s total market cap of roughly $2.1 trillion.

On the other hand, PreStocks’ SpaceX token also showed how messy the gap between tokenized pre-IPO exposure and actual stock can get after trading in the real, underlying asset begins. One pseudonymous X user noted that the Solana-based PreStocks token appeared to be trading at a steep split-adjusted discount to SpaceX’s public shares, a claim backed up by CoinGecko market data from the first day of trading. PreStocks had already told users that this could happen, saying the underlying shares would unlock in tranches over the first six months after the IPO and that, during that lockup period, liquidity would be temporarily limited and the token would trade at a market-priced discount to the public stock price.

Notably, all of this occurred as regulators are still sorting out how tokenized stocks should work. In May, Bloomberg reported that the SEC delayed a plan, which had previously been reported as imminent, to allow the trading of tokenized stocks.

While tokenized stocks, much like stablecoins, are being promoted as evidence that crypto is finding real adoption, the situation around SpaceX stock tokenization showed how much of that adoption still depends on centralized issuers, custodians, brokers, exchanges, and allocation pipelines. This is, of course, almost the exact opposite of the original pitch for Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation was designed to reduce reliance on trusted financial intermediaries, but Bitcoin’s focus on decentralization may not be applicable in situations where centralized issuers are inherently part of the trust model associated with crypto tokens.

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