The scramble for SpaceX IPO access left many crypto users shut out at the final step. Binance Wallet, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet canceled their SpaceX pre-IPO offerings on Friday and refunded customers after xStocks, Kraken’s tokenized equities unit, failed to secure the underlying shares that had been promised for the products.
Bybit told users that “due to xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets, no SpaceX allocations were received.” The offerings had been marketed as a retail path into one of the most sought-after IPOs in recent years, using tokenized stock structures to package that access.
Retail demand swamped the shares available
Securing SpaceX stock was always going to be difficult. The company sought to raise $75 billion, and its initial plan reserved 30% of the deal for retail investors. Demand quickly outran that figure. Bloomberg reported that retail orders topped $100 billion, while CNBC said the retail slice was reduced to the low-20% range before pricing.
A person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that xStocks and its distribution partners collected more than $1 billion in customer orders. Once underwriters finalized allocations, a large share of those requests was left unfilled. Binance Wallet, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet received no shares at all and pulled their products. Kraken and xStocks customers received only a fraction of what they had requested.
The shortfall was not limited to crypto platforms. Data compiled by Access IPOs showed that some retail investors using traditional brokerages also received only part of the shares they had sought. An xStocks spokesperson said “overwhelming demand” kept all orders from being fulfilled and that funds linked to unfilled subscriptions had been returned.
The bottleneck was sourcing shares, not minting tokens
The episode became a clear reminder of how tokenized securities work in practice. Issuing a token is one step; obtaining and holding the underlying asset is the harder one. Dinari said the problem appeared to be that demand far exceeded the supply of shares that could actually be sourced. If the stock cannot be acquired, allocated, and held within the required regulatory framework, there is no asset to tokenize.
That kept the focus on the market underneath the token rather than the blockchain layer itself. SpaceX cut the retail allocation, demand surged, and there were not enough shares to satisfy all orders. One industry participant described the outcome to CoinDesk as a case of “overpromising and underdelivering”, not a breakdown in the technology.
xStocks still launched its tokenized SpaceX product after the IPO under the ticker SPCXx. Arkham data showed about $24 million in tokenized shares circulating onchain at the time of publication. Ondo Finance and Dinari, neither of which offered pre-IPO access, also introduced tokenized SpaceX products after the company’s market debut.
Olivia Vande Woude, who leads tokenization business development at Ava Labs, wrote on X that the blockchain rails worked as designed. What failed, she said, was something older and more ordinary: the process of actually sourcing the shares.