On June 12, 2026, SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut at an offering price of $135 per share under the ticker SPCX. The company raised $75 billion, setting a record for IPO fundraising. After the open, SPCX briefly traded above $170, more than 25% higher than the issue price. While traditional markets celebrated the listing, the crypto industry’s first large-scale attempt to give retail users IPO access through a tokenized-stock framework ended with widespread cancellations, refunds and extremely small allocations.
The core infrastructure behind the experiment was xStocks, a tokenized equity framework issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a company under Payward Services, the parent company of Kraken. The xStocks model is designed to make each token correspond 1:1 to underlying real shares, with the actual shares held by regulated brokers. Kraken was the first to launch SpaceX IPO Access on June 5, using the token code SPCXx and opening subscriptions to verified users in more than 110 regions.
Other platforms quickly followed. Bybit launched its IPO Express product on June 7 and made the SpaceX offering its first listed target, using an indicative price of 135 USDC plus a 5% underwriting fee. Each user could subscribe with a minimum of 100 USDC and place up to 50 subscription orders. Binance then introduced SPCXx subscriptions under the name of its “first IPO Campaign.” Bitget Wallet also launched a similar product through the xStocks framework on Solana, starting with a $3 million quota, expanding it to $13 million due to strong demand, and seeing it oversubscribed by four times within 30 minutes.
When SpaceX officially listed on June 12, the mismatch became clear. Crypto platforms began issuing notices saying that xStocks had received far fewer underlying shares from underwriters than expected and could not deliver enough shares to satisfy platform demand. Bitget said on X: “The xStocks team made every effort to secure allocation, but ultimately failed 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. It said all subscription funds would be automatically refunded 100% to users’ original accounts, with eligible participants receiving a compensation reward of about 10% annualized interest.
Binance, Bitget and Bybit subsequently canceled their campaigns and announced full refunds, while also promising additional compensation to affected users. On-chain data showed that Binance’s SPCXx subscription campaign attracted about $557 million in USDC commitments from 27,689 wallet addresses within 28 hours of launch. More than 81% of addresses subscribed no more than $20,000 in a single order, while 114 addresses each staked at least $500,000. After canceling the campaign, Binance said it would fully return the locked USDC and airdrop $1 million worth of bStocks SpaceX tokens, SPCXB, to all participating users, with delivery expected before June 18.
Kraken, the exchange associated with xStocks, also disappointed many participants. Community feedback showed that successful Kraken subscribers generally received a fixed allocation of 4.2786 SPCXx tokens regardless of how much they had committed. At the $135 issue price, that amounted to roughly $578 to $606, with the remaining funds refunded. Kraken has not officially confirmed that allocation figure. Some users in mainland China who received shares also reported that the app page showed SpaceX share units could not be traded due to regional restrictions, meaning the roughly four shares they received were not necessarily sellable.
Kraken explained on its support page that the right to allocate IPO shares belongs to underwriters, and that allocation can be handled on a pro rata, random, tiered or relationship-based basis. It said that in a high-demand environment, receiving only a partial allocation, or even no allocation, is a normal result. After the incident spread, Chinese-language communities on X, formerly Twitter, filled with 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), with the rest refunded. Luckily I didn’t lose money, just used a large amount to earn a tiny bit...” User @jijioulei33190 wrote more sharply: “Whether it’s 1,000 U or 100,000 U, everyone gets 4.2 shares of SpaceX... Chinese-region users got the stock, I ** can’t trade it, can only buy and not sell?”
Overseas user @MengLayer, also known as Chen Xiaomeng, received a 606 U allocation and posted a screenshot showing SPCXx being swapped back into USDC on Kraken Pro. The caption read: “One million for IPO subscription, earned 60 U, I’m really awesome.” He also quoted another user’s complaint: “If it rises, they refund you; if it falls, they give it to you.” Some users also speculated that user allocations were privately withheld after the shares rose, but that claim was not confirmed by the platforms.
Not every crypto platform ended with only 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; together with the Kraken portion, today’s net profit was 127 dollars. In today’s crypto market where ‘90% of people are cursing,’ being able to pick up 127 dollars already makes me satisfied.” Compared with Kraken’s fixed “4.2 shares per person” allocation, Gate’s proportional allocation mechanism gave some users a more flexible way to realize actual gains.
Kraken emphasized that the allocation shortage came from underwriters’ distribution decisions rather than a technical or operational issue on the platform. In other words, the problem was not whether tokenized stocks could be issued, settled or displayed on-chain. The problem was that crypto platforms did not truly control the upstream resources needed for IPO placement. SpaceX issued about 555.6 million shares at $135 each, raised about $75 billion, and reached an implied valuation of $1.75 trillion. With very strong retail subscription demand, the aggregated demand brought in by crypto platforms far exceeded the amount they were able to obtain from the traditional underwriting system.
For most retail users in the crypto industry, the SpaceX IPO banquet remained out of reach. The first large-scale test of an “on-chain IPO” showed that while the demand side was already active, the supply side was still controlled by traditional finance. As long as quota sources, underwriting relationships and asset-delivery capacity remain disconnected, a smooth on-chain entry point cannot by itself change where ordinary retail investors stand in the IPO allocation chain.