On June 12, 2026, SpaceX made its Nasdaq debut at an issue price of $135 per share under the ticker SPCX. The offering raised $75 billion, setting a record for IPO fundraising. After the market opened, SPCX briefly traded above $170, more than 25% higher than the issue price. Based on the offering details, SpaceX issued roughly 555.6 million shares and reached an implied valuation of $1.75 trillion.
While the listing itself became a landmark event for traditional finance, the crypto industry’s attempt to open IPO access to retail users through tokenized stock products ran into a major allocation problem. Bybit, Binance and Bitget Wallet each announced cancellations and full refunds. Kraken, which many community members had viewed as the more credible route because of its connection to xStocks, also disappointed users: community posts said that most successful subscribers received only about 4.2786 SPCXx tokens regardless of how much they had committed, with the remainder refunded.
xStocks served as the shared infrastructure behind the campaigns
The core infrastructure in the incident was xStocks, a tokenized equity framework issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, an entity under Payward Services, Kraken’s parent company. The design goal of xStocks is to create tokens that correspond 1:1 with underlying real shares, with the actual shares held in custody by a regulated broker. Kraken was the first to launch SpaceX IPO Access on June 5, using the token code SPCXx and opening subscriptions to verified users across more than 110 regions.
Bybit followed on June 7 with its IPO Express product and chose SpaceX as the first target listed under the service. The indicated price was 135 USDC, plus a 5% underwriting fee. A single user could subscribe with a minimum of 100 USDC and place up to 50 subscription orders. Binance later introduced an SPCXx subscription under the name of its first “IPO Campaign.” Bitget Wallet also launched a similar product through the xStocks framework on Solana. Its initial quota was $3 million, later expanded to $13 million because of strong demand, and the product was oversubscribed four times within 30 minutes.
Insufficient underwriting allocation triggered cancellations
On the day SpaceX officially listed, several crypto platforms issued announcements saying that the number of underlying shares xStocks actually obtained from underwriters was far below expectations and could not satisfy platform demand. Bitget said on X that the xStocks team had made every effort to secure allocation, but the allocation was ultimately not implemented as expected. Bybit also confirmed on X that because xStocks could not deliver the underlying assets, Bybit did not receive any SpaceX share allocation. All subscription funds would be automatically refunded 100% to the original accounts, and eligible participating users would receive a compensation reward of about 10% annualized interest.
Binance, Bitget and Bybit then canceled their campaigns and announced full refunds, while also promising additional compensation to affected users. On-chain data showed that Binance’s SPCXx campaign attracted about $557 million in USDC subscription commitments from 27,689 wallet addresses within 28 hours of opening. 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 refund the locked USDC and airdrop $1 million worth of bStocks SpaceX tokens, SPCXB, to all participants, with arrival expected before June 18.
Kraken users reported a nearly fixed 4.2786 SPCXx allocation
Kraken, the exchange associated with xStocks, produced a result that many users also found unsatisfactory. According to community feedback, successful Kraken subscribers received the same 4.2786 SPCXx tokens regardless of the amount they committed. At the $135 issue price, that was equivalent to roughly $578 to $606, with all remaining funds refunded. Kraken has not officially confirmed that number. Some users from mainland China who received shares also reported that the app page showed SpaceX stock fractions could not be traded because of regional restrictions, meaning the allocated shares might not actually be sellable for those users.
Kraken explained on its support page that IPO allocation rights belong to the underwriters and that allocation can be made on a pro rata, random, tiered or relationship-based basis. In a high-demand environment, partial allocation or even zero allocation can be a normal outcome. After the incident spread, many Chinese-language users posted screenshots and complaints on X. Kraken user @joeylu0627 said that he invested 200,000 U and ultimately received 4.2786 shares of SPCX, worth about $700, with the rest refunded. He wrote that he was lucky not to lose money, but had only earned a very small return with a large amount of capital. User @jijioulei33190 used sharper wording, saying that whether a user subscribed 1,000 U or 100,000 U, they all received 4.2 shares of SpaceX, and complained that Chinese-language users had received stock but could not trade, 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. He wrote: “1 million for IPO subscription, earned 60 U, I’m really awesome.” He also quoted another user’s complaint: “If it goes up, they refund you; if it goes down, they give it to you.” Some users also speculated that because the value of the allocation rose, user shares may have been handled privately.
Gate.io users reported actual allocation while the supply bottleneck remained
Not every crypto platform ended only with refunds. During this largely unsuccessful wave of tokenized IPO access, a small number of platform users did receive shares and realized gains. Gate.io also had actual share allocation. User @px521com2 posted a detailed subscription account: Gate subscription of $5,786, refund of $5,557, sale proceeds of $268 and profit of $39. Including the Kraken portion, the user said the total net profit for the day was $127. Compared with Kraken’s roughly “4.2 shares per person” fixed allocation, Gate’s proportional allocation mechanism gave some users a more flexible path to actual returns.
Kraken emphasized that the lack of allocation came from underwriters’ allocation decisions, not from a technical or operational issue on the platform side. In other words, the problem was not whether tokenized shares could be issued, settled or displayed on-chain. The problem was that crypto platforms did not truly control upstream IPO placement resources. In SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO, retail demand aggregated through crypto platforms far exceeded the allocation that those platforms could obtain from the traditional underwriting system. The first large-scale test of so-called on-chain IPO access showed a practical constraint: demand may already be concentrated at on-chain entrances, but allocation sources, underwriting relationships and asset delivery capabilities remain inside the traditional finance chain.