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SpaceX went public on June 12, priced its shares at $135, and raised a record $75 billion in the process. The implied valuation landed somewhere between $1.77 trillion and $1.8 trillion, making it the kind of IPO that rewrites the record books.
Multiple crypto exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, and Bitget, had promoted tokenized access to the SpaceX IPO through xStocks, a service linked to Kraken and its parent company Payward. The pitch was simple and intoxicating: crypto-native investors could get exposure to the hottest IPO in years without navigating legacy brokerage accounts. More than $1 billion in customer orders poured in. Then, on June 14, the cancellation notices arrived.
xStocks couldn’t secure the shares. Every single order was cancelled, and full refunds were issued.
What went wrong with xStocks
xStocks needed to acquire real SpaceX shares on Nasdaq and then represent them as tokens on crypto platforms. When the IPO was massively oversubscribed by both institutional and retail investors on the traditional side, there simply weren’t enough shares to go around.
Binance attempted damage control by offering $1 million in bStocks allocation as compensation for affected users.
The campaigns that collapsed were offering synthetic exposure, not direct ownership rights. Investors weren’t buying shares. They were buying the promise that someone else would buy shares on their behalf.
A bright spot on Solana
Not every tokenized approach failed. Backpack Securities launched SPCX tokens on Solana with a fundamentally different model: 1:1 backing with actual shares and built-in redemption options. The tokens represented genuine ownership, not a derivative bet that someone downstream would fulfill their end of the deal.
What this means for investors
Crypto platforms marketed access to an equity product they couldn’t deliver, collected more than $1 billion in orders, and then had to unwind everything two days later.
For anyone considering tokenized equity products going forward, the lesson is almost painfully simple. Look at the backing mechanism. If a platform is offering synthetic exposure with no guaranteed claim on underlying assets, you’re essentially trusting a supply chain that has no contractual obligation to deliver.
Binance’s $1 million compensation gesture was a rounding error on the $75 billion IPO, and users will remember which side of that equation they were on.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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