On June 12, 2026, SpaceX debuted on Nasdaq at an offering price of $135 per share under the ticker SPCX. The company raised $75 billion, setting a fundraising record in IPO history. After the market opened, SPCX briefly traded above $170, more than 25% higher than its offering price. The listing carried an implied valuation of $1.75 trillion and immediately became one of the largest public-market events referenced by crypto retail users that day.
Yet while the traditional market celebrated SpaceX’s first trading session, the crypto industry’s attempt to create a large-scale retail IPO access channel through tokenized equity infrastructure ran into a broad failure. Bybit, Binance and Bitget Wallet all announced cancellations and full refunds. Kraken, which had been regarded by some users as the more reliable route because of its connection to xStocks, also disappointed many participants: community reports said that most successful users received only about 4.2786 SPCXx tokens, regardless of how much they subscribed.
xStocks served as the main tokenized equity framework
The central infrastructure behind the incident was xStocks, a tokenized equity framework issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, which is under Payward Services, Kraken’s parent company. The xStocks tokens were designed to correspond 1:1 with real underlying shares, with actual shares held in custody by regulated brokers. Kraken opened SpaceX IPO Access on June 5 under the token code SPCXx, making the subscription available to verified users in more than 110 regions.
Bybit followed on June 7 with its IPO Express product and made the SpaceX offering the first asset available through that product. The indicated price was 135 USDC, with an additional 5% underwriting fee. Each user could subscribe with a minimum of 100 USDC and place up to 50 subscription orders. Binance later launched an SPCXx subscription under the name of its “first IPO Campaign.” Bitget Wallet also introduced a similar product through the xStocks framework on Solana. Its initial quota was $3 million, later expanded quickly to $13 million due to strong demand, and the offering was oversubscribed four times within 30 minutes.
Platforms cited insufficient allocation from underwriters
On the same day SpaceX officially listed on Nasdaq, crypto platforms began publishing notices saying that the underlying share allocation xStocks actually received from underwriters was far below expectations and could not be delivered in full according to platform demand. Bitget wrote on X: “The xStocks team made every effort to secure allocation, but ultimately was unable to finalize it as expected.” Bybit also confirmed on X that because xStocks could not deliver the underlying assets, Bybit did not receive any SpaceX share allocation. Bybit said all subscription funds would be automatically returned 100% to the original accounts, and eligible participating users would receive a compensation reward of about 10% annualized interest.
Binance, Bitget and Bybit then announced that they would cancel the relevant campaigns, issue full refunds and provide additional compensation to affected users. On-chain data showed that Binance’s SPCXx subscription campaign attracted about $557 million in USDC subscription commitments from 27,689 wallet addresses within 28 hours of opening. More than 81% of those addresses subscribed no more than $20,000 in a single order, while 114 addresses each staked at least $500,000. After announcing the cancellation, Binance said it would fully return the locked USDC and airdrop a total of $1 million worth of bStocks SpaceX tokens, SPCXB, to all participating users, with delivery expected by June 18.
Kraken users reported nearly identical small allocations
Kraken, the exchange linked to xStocks, became another focus of user complaints. Community feedback indicated that successful Kraken participants received a fixed allocation of 4.2786 SPCXx tokens regardless of how much money they put in. At the $135 offering price, that allocation was worth roughly $578 to $606, with all remaining funds returned. Kraken has not officially confirmed this exact number. At the same time, some mainland Chinese users who received shares said the app page showed that they could not trade SpaceX share units because of regional restrictions, meaning that the four shares received through the subscription might not be sellable for those users.
Kraken stated on its support page that IPO allocation rights belong to the underwriters and that allocations can be made pro rata, randomly, by tiers or based on relationships. In a high-demand environment, partial allocation or even zero allocation can be a normal result. After the incident spread, Chinese-speaking users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots and complaints. Kraken user @joeylu0627 wrote: “In my case, I put in 200,000 U and finally received 4.2786 shares of SPCX, worth about 700 dollars. The remaining amount was refunded. Fortunately, I did not lose money, but it was just using a large amount of money to make a tiny amount…”
User @jijioulei33190 was more direct: “Whether it is 1,000 U or 100,000 U, everyone gets 4.2 shares of SpaceX… Chinese-region users got the shares, but I ** cannot trade them, only buy and not sell?” Overseas user @MengLayer, also known as Chen Xiaomeng, posted a screenshot showing a swap of SPCXx back into USDC on Kraken Pro, writing: “One million for the IPO subscription, made 60 U, I am so awesome.” He also quoted another user’s complaint: “If it goes up, they refund you; if it falls, then they give it to you.” Some users also speculated that when the value of the shares rose, user allocations had been handled privately.
Gate.io users showed actual allocations while upstream access remained limited
Not every crypto platform ended only with refunds. Gate.io also had actual share allocations. User @px521com2 posted a detailed subscription record: “Sesame (Gate) subscribed 5,786 dollars → 5,557 dollars returned → sold for 268 dollars, profit 39 dollars; plus the Kraken part, today’s total net profit is 127 dollars. In today’s crypto market where ‘nine out of ten people are cursing,’ being able to pick up 127 dollars already makes me very satisfied.” Compared with Kraken’s user-described “4.2 shares per person” fixed allocation, Gate’s pro rata distribution mechanism gave some participants a different amount of actual profit space.
Kraken emphasized that the shortage of allocation came from underwriter distribution decisions, not from platform technology or operational issues. In other words, the problem was not whether tokenized stocks could be issued, settled or displayed on-chain. The core issue was that crypto platforms did not control the upstream resources for IPO placement. SpaceX issued about 555.6 million shares at $135 per share and raised around $75 billion, setting a global IPO fundraising record. Under intense retail subscription demand, the aggregated demand brought together by crypto platforms greatly exceeded the allocation they could obtain from the traditional underwriting system. The large-scale trial of an “on-chain IPO” showed that the demand side had already been gathered, while the supply side remained in the hands of traditional finance.