Speculation has been building that retail traders could be selling bitcoin to fund allocations in the SpaceX IPO. The available on-chain data, though, does not show clear evidence of that trade.
SpaceX, the Elon Musk-controlled company spanning rockets, satellites and AI, is selling as much as 30% of its record $75 billion offering directly to retail investors through Robinhood, Fidelity and Charles Schwab. That is more than three times the portion usually reserved for individuals in a typical IPO. Bloomberg reported that the roadshow opened on Thursday already oversubscribed, with orders exceeding the shares available, at a $1.8 trillion valuation.
Over the same stretch, bitcoin fell about 16% and briefly traded below $60,000 before rebounding to around $61,000, according to CoinDesk data. The timing helped fuel the theory that money was leaving crypto for brokerage accounts. Price action alone does not prove that link.
Stablecoin readings do not show an unusual exit into dollars
The cleanest way to trace money leaving crypto for cash is usually through stablecoins. A trader selling bitcoin to fund a brokerage account often converts into a dollar-pegged token such as USDC or tether, then redeems that token for dollars. That tends to appear in two places: stablecoins moving off exchanges, and a later decline in circulating supply when issuers burn redeemed tokens.
Neither metric showed an anomaly in the data reviewed by CoinDesk. CryptoQuant figures indicate that outflows for USDC and tether remained within the range seen since February. The biggest single-day moves in recent months were $2.5 billion in USDC on May 22 and $3.6 billion in tether on May 20, both before the latest sell-off.
Large BTC and ETH withdrawals point away from a selling wave
The more striking on-chain move came in bitcoin and ether themselves. On Friday, about 66,470 BTC and roughly 2.49 million ETH left exchanges, according to CryptoQuant, making them some of the largest single-day withdrawal totals of the year.
That matters because an outflow means coins are moving from an exchange to a private wallet, which is what buyers often do after taking delivery. Selling usually works in the opposite direction, with coins transferred onto exchanges to be sold. Based on that public blockchain picture, there is no obvious sign of retail traders rushing coins onto exchanges, dumping them, and wiring cash into IPO subscriptions.
Brokerage data will be needed because on-chain tracking has limits
There is still a blind spot. On-chain data cannot see what happens inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account. A customer can sell bitcoin for dollars within those platforms without either asset touching a public blockchain in a visible way.
That means the question will not be settled until the brokerages publish their own numbers. Robinhood releases monthly trading metrics, with June crypto volumes due in mid-July. Coinbase is expected to break out retail activity in its second-quarter results later in the month.