SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut met a crowded on-chain IPO experiment
According to Odaily author jk, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12, 2026, under the ticker SPCX, with an offering price of $135 per share. The company raised $75 billion, setting a financing record in IPO history, and the listing implied a valuation of $1.75 trillion. After the market opened, SPCX briefly traded above $170, more than 25% higher than the offering price.
On the same day that traditional financial markets celebrated SpaceX’s debut, the crypto industry’s first large-scale attempt to use a tokenized framework to open IPO access to retail users ran into a broad breakdown. Bybit, Binance and Bitget Wallet announced cancellations and full refunds. Kraken, which had previously been viewed by many community members as the most reliable route, disappointed users as well: community feedback indicated that, regardless of the amount committed, many successful participants ultimately received only about 4.2786 shares’ worth of allocation.
xStocks sat at the center of the product structure
The key infrastructure involved in the incident was xStocks, a tokenized equity framework issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited, which is under Payward Services, Kraken’s parent company. The design goal of xStocks is to map tokens 1:1 to real underlying shares, with the physical 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 in more than 110 jurisdictions. Bybit followed on June 7 with its IPO Express product, making the SpaceX offering its first listed target. The indicative price was 135 USDC, with an additional 5% underwriting fee. Each user could subscribe for a minimum of 100 USDC and place up to 50 subscription orders.
Binance then introduced its SPCXx subscription under the label of its “first IPO Campaign.” Bitget Wallet also launched a similar product through the xStocks framework on Solana. Its initial quota was $3 million, then expanded rapidly to $13 million as demand increased, and it was oversubscribed four times within 30 minutes.
Underlying share allocations fell far short of demand
After SpaceX formally listed on Nasdaq and raised $75 billion, crypto platforms began issuing notices on the same day. Their message was consistent: the actual underlying share allocation that xStocks received from the underwriters was far lower than expected, and xStocks could not deliver enough shares to meet platform demand.
Bitget said on X: “xStocks team did its utmost to secure the allocation, but ultimately failed to implement it as expected.” Bybit also confirmed on X that, because xStocks could not deliver the underlying assets, Bybit had not received any SpaceX share allocation. All subscription funds would be automatically returned 100% to the original accounts, and eligible participating users would receive a compensation reward at an annualized rate of about 10%.
Binance, Bitget and Bybit then announced that they would cancel their activities, refund users in full and provide additional compensation to affected participants. 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 launch. 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 the cancellation, Binance said it would return all locked USDC and airdrop a total of $1 million worth of bStocks SpaceX tokens, SPCXB, to all participating users. The airdrop was expected to arrive before June 18.
Kraken users reported fixed allocations, while Gate.io users showed small profits
Kraken, the exchange associated with xStocks, also left users dissatisfied. Community feedback indicated that users whose subscriptions succeeded received a fixed 4.2786 SPCXx tokens regardless of the amount they had committed. At the $135 offering price, that was roughly $578 to $606, while the remaining funds were refunded. Kraken had not officially confirmed that figure. Some mainland Chinese users who received an allocation also said the app showed that, because of regional restrictions, they could not trade their SpaceX share exposure, meaning the four shares they obtained were not necessarily sellable.
Kraken explained on its support page that IPO allocation rights belong to the underwriters, and allocations may be handled on a pro rata, random, tiered or relationship-based basis. In a high-demand environment, receiving only a partial allocation or even no allocation is a normal result under that process.
As the incident spread, Chinese-language users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots and complaints. Kraken user @joeylu0627 described the experience in detail: “For me, I put in 200,000 U and ultimately got 4.2786 shares of SPCX, worth about 700 dollars. The remaining amount was refunded. Luckily I did not lose money; I just used a large amount of money to earn a tiny bit…”
User @jijioulei33190 used stronger wording: “Whether it is 1,000 U or 100,000 U, everyone gets 4.2 shares of SpaceX… Chinese-language users got the stock, but I ** cannot trade it, can only buy and cannot sell?” Overseas user @MengLayer, also known as Chen Xiaomeng, who received a 606 U allocation, posted a screenshot showing SPCXx being instantly swapped back to USDC on Kraken Pro and wrote: “1 million for new-share subscription, earned 60 U, I am 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 the handling of user allocations was questionable because the value of the shares had risen.
Not every crypto platform ended with only refunds. In this largely stalled wave of tokenized new-share subscriptions, a small number of users on some platforms actually received shares and realized paper or trading gains. Gate.io also had real allocations. User @px521com2 posted a detailed bill: “Sesame (Gate) subscribed with 5,786 dollars → refunded 5,557 dollars → sold for 268 dollars, profit 39 dollars; plus the Kraken portion, 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 “4.2 shares per person” fixed allocation, Gate’s pro rata allocation mechanism gave some users a more flexible space for actual returns.
Kraken emphasized that the allocation shortage came from the underwriters’ allocation decisions, not from platform technology or operational problems. In other words, the issue was not whether tokenized stocks could be issued, settled or displayed on-chain. The more direct constraint was that crypto platforms did not truly control the upstream IPO placement resources. SpaceX issued about 555.6 million shares at $135 per share and raised about $75 billion, setting a global IPO financing record. Under extremely high retail subscription demand, the aggregated demand brought in by crypto platforms far exceeded what they could obtain from the traditional underwriting system. In this SpaceX IPO feast, most crypto retail users did not get a real seat at the table, and the large-scale test of “on-chain IPO” exposed a practical limitation: unless quota sources, underwriting relationships and asset delivery capacity are connected, a smooth on-chain entry point does not change ordinary retail users’ position in the IPO allocation chain.