Bitget Wallet Research framed the recent review of on-chain IPO subscription around a longer history of blockchain-based capital aggregation. In November 2021, ConstitutionDAO brought together more than $40 million within days in an attempt to purchase a first-edition copy of the United States Constitution from 1787. The group ultimately lost the Sotheby’s auction to a hedge fund billionaire. It arrived with capital, but it did not leave with the asset. For many observers, that event showed for the first time that blockchain rails could gather scattered retail capital from around the world and direct it toward a scarce asset in a very short period of time.
From ConstitutionDAO to SPCX: the same distribution force in a different venue
Four and a half years later, a similar pattern appeared in the context of a U.S. stock IPO. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX, trading under the ticker SPCX, listed on Nasdaq. Its opening price was $150, about 11% above the $135 indicated subscription price, and the listing was described as the strongest IPO in history. For most users, a U.S. IPO remains an almost invisible door: without qualified investor status, a traditional brokerage account, or a long-standing relationship with underwriters, access to such offerings is extremely limited.
Several crypto platforms tried to bring that access point on-chain through tokenization. Bitget Wallet also worked with the tokenized stock platform xStocks to open tokenized subscription access for the SPCX IPO. The individual subscription range was set at $10 to $5,000, reducing the user-facing threshold to nearly zero. However, the result was not successful. Because xStocks’ upstream underwriting channel failed to obtain the corresponding allocation, the underlying shares for the tokenized subscription could not be delivered as scheduled, and the attempt ended with refunds.
On-chain access met the allocation rules of traditional syndicates
The review argues that tokenized IPO subscription is, at its core, a tokenized distribution of traditional brokerage IPO allocations. What an on-chain channel can do is move the subscription interface onto blockchain rails: users can participate from anywhere and use stablecoins without opening a conventional brokerage account. What tokenization cannot change is that the right to decide allocation remains in the hands of the traditional financial syndicate.
In the case of SpaceX, the joint bookrunners included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citi, JPMorgan and other top investment banks. These institutions organized bookbuilding, consolidated demand and ultimately decided how allocations were distributed. That allocation logic prioritizes institutions, relationships and long-term clients. Underwriters tend to favor large orders and institutional clients that can hold positions steadily. The scarcer and more popular an IPO is, the more visible that tendency becomes. SpaceX was oversubscribed by about four times, and BlackRock alone placed an order of about $5 billion, leaving only extremely limited room for crypto-native channels.
This is the core mismatch identified in the review: blockchain has strong global distribution capacity, yet the most important step is governed by a set of rules that does not belong to blockchain. The review lists two routes to breaking through this constraint. One is for crypto-friendly institutions to gradually enter traditional underwriting networks and obtain institutional seats in the primary market through licensing, capital strength and long-term accumulation. The other is to push assets to be issued natively on-chain from the source, bypassing the existing IPO allocation system altogether. Before either route is fully established, tokenized IPO subscription will continue to face a supply-side ceiling.
An imperfect but important stress test for on-chain infrastructure
Although delivery did not take place, the attempted subscription still produced two concrete signals. The first was demand. More than $800 million in subscription funds gathered from ordinary users around the world in a short period of time, all directed toward an asset that was almost completely closed to them through traditional channels. Assets such as SpaceX are restricted by geography, qualified-investor thresholds and brokerage account requirements. On-chain access offered a different entry point: users needed a wallet and stablecoins rather than a traditional brokerage account or a complex account-opening process.
The review also notes that on-chain participation can provide flexibility after allocation in ways traditional channels often do not. Conventional IPO subscription frequently includes “anti-flipping” constraints. Participants who sell quickly after receiving shares can face penalties such as clawed-back commissions or blacklisting. Tokenized assets usually do not impose a mandatory lock-up, meaning they can be traded freely once received. For retail users who have long been blocked by the question of whether they can even enter, the ability to move in and out after entry is also a real form of value.
The second signal was execution. The event gave on-chain infrastructure a real pressure test. Using Bitget Wallet as an example, the review states that the wallet relied on its self-developed DEX aggregator and multi-chain gas payment support to extend subscription access to USDC and USDT across five chains. Users could participate with stablecoins on any major supported chain, without manually bridging assets or getting stuck because they lacked the native gas token. This infrastructure supported more than $13 million in on-chain subscriptions in less than half an hour.
After delivery failure was confirmed, full refunds were completed in about four hours, covering principal, fees and exchange-rate differences. No user action was required throughout the process. More importantly, every refund, reconciliation and status change was executed on-chain as a publicly verifiable transaction. Compared with traditional brokerage refund processes that depend on internal ledgers and manual coordination, the review says this stress test demonstrated the transparency and execution efficiency of on-chain infrastructure.
Tokenized IPO subscription and Pre-IPO Perp serve different needs
Because tokenized IPO products cannot yet change how primary-market assets are supplied, the review suggests expectations should be adjusted. In its more realistic form, tokenized IPO subscription is a “stablecoinized” transformation of the traditional IPO participation process. When subscription demand exceeds the actual allocation, oversubscription, lottery allocation, pro-rata distribution and even full refunds will become normal outcomes.
The review then compares tokenized IPO subscription with another form of participation: Pre-IPO perpetual contracts, or Pre-IPO Perps. The two tools serve different user preferences. Tokenized subscription is closer to spot logic, because it is supported by real underlying assets. It suits users with lower risk appetite who do not want to bear leverage risk or funding-rate wear, but the trade-off is limited supply and the risk of oversubscription, lottery results or full refunds. Pre-IPO Perps do not require waiting for allocation, do not rely on underwriter distribution and do not require delivery of real shares. Instead, they allow trading around price expectations for an unlisted asset, offering greater flexibility while requiring users to accept leverage and high volatility.
The review also points to signs of price discovery in Pre-IPO Perps. SPCX perpetual contracts had traded 24/7 on venues including Hyperliquid since May 18, several weeks before the official June 12 listing. Near the listing date, the cross-venue volume-weighted average price was about $155, roughly a 15% premium to the $135 issue price. The first official listing trade was $150, showing that the on-chain market had largely converged near the actual opening price before the stock began trading. Cerebras was given as another reference point: when it listed, Hyperliquid’s Pre-IPO Perp pricing differed from the $350 opening price by only about 1.3%.
The unresolved problem is structural, not only operational
The review closes by returning to the 2021 auction. ConstitutionDAO lost in the bidding process, while the tokenized SPCX subscription failed because of trust and qualification. In the SpaceX case, the on-chain channel did not even enter the room where allocation decisions were made. The reason for failure shifted from “the bid was not high enough” to “there was no qualification to enter,” moving the issue from execution to structure.
The maturity of on-chain infrastructure does not automatically open the supply side of off-chain assets. These are two different developments, and they do not move at the same speed. The review compares this friction to earlier shifts in financial infrastructure, from the emergence of clearinghouses to electronic trading replacing open outcry. Old and new systems can coexist for long periods while repeatedly rubbing against each other. Traditional finance will not open the IPO allocation gate immediately after one failed subscription, just as Sotheby’s did not change its auction rules because of ConstitutionDAO. But such friction leaves traces: it changes user perception, platform capability and institutional views of crypto channels over time.
For Bitget Wallet Research, the most important record from this event is not only the failed result. All users who took part in the attempted subscription have already experienced using stablecoins in their wallets to reach an asset that previously belonged mainly to institutions. Once that perception is formed, it is difficult to reverse. The demand side has been tested, and the infrastructure side has also been tested. The remaining bottleneck is the access structure on the supply side. In that sense, the review turns an unclear failure into a clear problem, and only a clear problem can be addressed.