In brief
With the help of crypto rails, international retail investors have a variety of ways to bypass Wall Street gatekeepers.
Those avenues include prediction markets like Polymarket, perpetual futures on exchanges , and synthetic assets.
SpaceX’s high-stakes debut represents a fast-approaching test that could shape sentiment around nascent means of exposure.
Crypto is pushing SpaceX’s IPO far beyond traditional brokerage accounts.
With Wall Street’s books heavily oversubscribed ahead of Friday’s historic liftoff, the industry is enabling investors to speculate on the firm’s $1.75 trillion debut in a variety of ways.
Those options include wagers on prediction markets, bets made via perpetual futures, and the purchase of synthetic assets designed to mirror the performance of Elon Musk’s rocket-maker.
To be sure, most products offered by various firms provide no dividends, voting rights, or a direct claim on SpaceX assets. On top of that, many of these firms’ creations aren’t available in the U.S., stemming from a shifting regulatory backdrop around tokenized assets.
The offerings, in many ways, underscore how the edges between traditional and digital assets continue to blur. Yet SpaceX’s high-stakes debut represents a fast-approaching test that could play an outsized role in shaping sentiment around nascent means of exposure.
Nearly a year ago, controversy brewed around so-called stock tokens made available by Robinhood to customers in Europe that are tied to SpaceX and OpenAI. After the ChatGPT maker contended that the tokens don’t represent real shares, Robinhood clarified that they represent “tokenized contracts that follow their price, recorded on a blockchain.”
On Polymarket, users can place wagers on SpaceX’s closing market cap, which is currently projected to fall somewhere between $2 trillion and $2.5 trillion on its first day. Notably, Kalshi, which is strictly based and regulated in the U.S., isn’t fielding similar bets.
On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, traders foresaw a 94% chance of the company’s market cap closing above $1.3 trillion on Friday.
Kraken parent Payward offers tokens that will be backed by SpaceX shares, available at the firm’s fixed offering price of $135 per share. With overseas investors often struggling to access U.S. IPOs, the offering through xStocks has become available in more than 100 countries.
“A retail investor in Medellín, Madrid, or Malaysia can have similar access,” Global Head of Payward Services Mark Greenberg said in a statement earlier this month. “Going public should mean public to everyone.”
Coinbase International, meanwhile, has rolled out a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract for SpaceX, which references the company’s implied market valuation. When the rocket-maker does debut, positions are set to rebase accordingly, per the exchange’s website.
On Hyperliquid, the decentralized exchange, traders can speculate on SpaceX using similar derivatives, which don’t expire and trade around the clock. As of writing, a market established via TradeXYZ valued Musk’s firm at $168 per share.
Even as SpaceX’s debut was less than a day away, crypto exchanges continued to unveil new products, including Backpack. The firm introduced a service allowing users to trade SpaceX-tied, Solana-based tokens on its platform, or within self-custodial wallets, set to be redeemable for traditional stock.
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