SpaceX Begins Nasdaq Trading With Tokenized Versions Mirroring Largest IPO in History
Markets
SpaceX opened for trading on Nasdaq Friday under the ticker SPCX, completing what Nasdaq and Morgan Stanley confirmed as the largest initial public offering in history.
The offering was priced at $135 per share and raised $75 billion pre-greenshoe, implying a $1.77 trillion valuation at open. Nasdaq confirmed the debut on its official account Friday morning. Morgan Stanley posted confirmation as co-lead underwriter, describing it as the largest IPO ever brought to market.
Asian Investors and the Crypto Demand Signal
Bloomberg reported Thursday that investors across Asia were largely excluded from the SpaceX book and turned to crypto-native products for exposure. The report documented retail and institutional demand flowing into tokenized SpaceX equity and perpetual futures as alternatives to the oversubscribed traditional offering.
That demand had already built substantial open interest in Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO SPCX perpetuals before the market open. Open interest was at above $200 million, the Hyperliquid dashboard shows. Hyperliquid’s total open interest across all perpetual markets stood at $8.77 billion on Friday, per DefiLlama, placing it as the largest decentralized perps venue by open interest.
Galaxy Digital co-founder Mike Novogratz described the IPO pricing as carrying speculation comparable to bitcoin, in comments circulated before the open.
The Live On-Chain Stack
Four regulated and crypto-native SPCX products settled into trading alongside the Nasdaq debut, completing a cross-chain tokenized-equity infrastructure The Defiant outlined Thursday:
Backpack Securities SPCX on Solana: Each token is backed 1:1 by a real SpaceX share held in Backpack’s regulated brokerage and is redeemable into a brokerage account, per the Solana Foundation’s official account. The token trades around the clock on SunriseDefi.
Ondo SPCXon: Ondo Finance’s tokenized version of the stock gives non-US retail and institutional users economic exposure equivalent to holding the equity with dividends reinvested, per Ondo’s app.
xStocks SPCXx: Backed by equity exposure via Backed Assets (JE) Limited and listed on Bybit and Kraken, this product joins Coinbase International and BitMEX in a four-venue tokenized equity race.
Hyperliquid SPCX perpetuals: Pre-IPO perps launched by Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid now settle to the live Nasdaq price, converting the pre-market derivative into a spot-tracking instrument.
The Coinbase International Exchange’s USDC-settled SPCX perpetual, launched June 4, also transitions to live-equity settlement at the open.
The Bitcoin Balance Sheet
SpaceX holds 18,712 BTC, valued at approximately $1.18 billion at current prices, according to CoinGecko’s public-company bitcoin treasury tracker. That places SpaceX ninth among publicly tracked corporate bitcoin holders, behind Strategy (845,256 BTC), Metaplanet (40,177 BTC), and MARA Holdings (35,303 BTC), and ahead of Tesla (11,509 BTC) and Coinbase Global (15,389 BTC).
Bitcoin analyst Pete Rizzo flagged the holding Friday morning, describing SpaceX as the first company of this scale to debut publicly with a bitcoin position on its books. The 18,712 BTC figure has not been confirmed in a public S-1 or prospectus filing; SpaceX conducted a direct listing, and primary SEC disclosures confirming the exact bitcoin count have not been publicly surfaced as of this writing. The CoinGecko tracker corroborates the figure as the consensus tracked count, sourced from pre-IPO corporate disclosures and tracker aggregators; it has not been verified against a primary regulatory document.
At $63,294 per BTC, the position represents roughly 1.6% of the $75 billion raised in the offering, per CoinGecko price data.
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