Crypto traders are already assigning Elon Musk’s SpaceX issuing a public market valuation before the rocket and satellite company has filed for an initial public offering.
On May 17, Hyperliquid-powered Trade.xyz launched a SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual futures contract, creating a live, cash-settled market where traders could place bets on where the privately held company might trade when it eventually goes public.
According to the company, the contract will trade under the ticker SPCX-USDC, opening with a reference price of $150, based on SpaceX’s reported 11.87 billion fully diluted shares.
That premise implied a valuation of SpaceX of about $1.78 trillion, putting the contract within the $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion range that SpaceX is reportedly targeting for a public offering.
However, SPCX’s trading quickly rose above that level as its value rose as high as $216, pushing its implied valuation above $2.5 trillion before settling near $203.
At the same time, the first twelve hours of trading generated a volume of more than $40 million, demonstrating how quickly crypto-native traders are entering a market that has no equivalent on traditional public exchanges.
This early move gives SpaceX a shadow market before Wall Street has an official listing price, underwriting range or public filing to analyze.
It also extends one of crypto’s fastest-growing market structure experiments into the private company arena, where access has historically been limited to venture funds, employees, secondary market investors and large institutions.
SPCX gives traders a market ahead of SpaceX’s IPO
The SpaceX contract is the second pre-IPO perpetual market launched by Trade.xyz, following Cerebras Systems, which began trading under the CBRS ticker on May 1.
The Cerebras product provided traders with an early test case for synthetic price discovery around private companies. Market observers noted that the trading price closely tracked the final listing price, providing Trade.xyz with an early validation point as it expanded into larger, more closely watched companies.
SpaceX gives that model a much bigger stage. The company is at the center of several public market topics, including reusable rockets, satellite internet, defense contracts, private space infrastructure and Elon Musk’s broader corporate network.
Facts from Arkham Intelligence shows that the company also has approximately 8,285 Bitcoin in custody at Coinbase Prime, worth approximately $637 million.
For these reasons, the potential stock market listing has long been seen as one of the most consequential IPO candidates in the world, even though the company has not yet filed an S-1 registration statement.
SPCX essentially creates a market-implied view of that future valuation. Traders can go long or short the contract with USDC as the quoted asset, with the price reflecting positioning, financing dynamics and market expectations of how SpaceX might be valued upon a public market debut.
The structure also gives crypto traders exposure to a company that has remained unavailable through normal public market channels.
SpaceX’s shares trade through private secondary markets and tender offers, but these venues are fragmented, limited and often inaccessible to retail investors. A perpetrator on the Hyperliquid list changes the entry point even though he does not claim ownership of the underlying company.
SPCX offers opportunities and risks for the market
While early trading in SPCX shows clear demand for SpaceX exposure, the contract’s credibility will depend on whether price ranges remain coherent as liquidity increases and the company moves closer to a stock market listing.
Alvin Kan, COO of Bitget Wallet, explained CryptoSlate that Hyperliquid’s launch of pre-IPO perpetuals tied to companies like SpaceX opens the stories of private companies to a broader trading audience through liquid, always-on crypto markets.
Kan said the appeal is simple because users can get synthetic exposure to high-profile companies that have traditionally been difficult to access.
However, he cautioned that these products are very different from traditional pre-IPO investments or tokenized stocks, as traders speculate on valuation and market sentiment rather than acquiring ownership, shareholder rights or claims on underlying shares.
According to him:
“The opportunity is that crypto infrastructure can dramatically expand access and pricing around private market demand… The challenge is that pricing these assets is inherently difficult because there is no continuous public market benchmark behind them.”
He also added that early liquidity could be driven more by short-term speculation than deep institutional participation, making oracle design and reference pricing critical.
Kan said the closer these products seem to resemble stock exposure in practice, the more important transparency becomes about what users are actually buying, especially from a regulatory and investor protection perspective.
Nicolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at Nansen, also shared it CryptoSlate that SPCX is structurally important because it extends crypto-native liquidity to exposure to late-stage private companies, an asset class that has historically been limited to venture investors, employee tender markets, and secondary equity buyers.
At the same time, Sondergaard said the launch will test whether perpetual futures can serve as a credible price discovery venue for a company without a public IPO and limited financial disclosure.
According to him:
“[SPCX] test whether onchain offender mechanisms, continuous funding rates, permissionless access, 24/7 trading and synthetic settlement can function as a credible price discovery venue for a company without a public IPO and limited public financial disclosure.
That test, Sondergaard explained, carries obvious risks, because a perpetual contract without a liquid underlying spot market could ultimately price both a story and an asset.
Funding rates may reflect positioning and sentiment, while the lack of delivery or redemption mechanisms means the contract may deviate from any reasonable estimate of intrinsic value.
That risk is especially relevant for SpaceX. The company’s cap table is complex, secondary market data is limited and Starlink’s financial profile remains difficult to assess from the outside.
These gaps cause traders to rely on reported tender valuations, investor expectations and market appetite for Musk-linked assets.
Still, SPCX could become a useful signal if liquidity deepens and the contract maintains a stable relationship with known private market prices.
It could also become a speculative platform where sentiment around SpaceX, Starlink, Musk and broader risk appetite moves faster than fundamentals.
Hyperliquid’s expansion brings Washington into focus
Meanwhile, the new SpaceX contract also comes at a sensitive time for Hyperliquid, the leading decentralized exchange.
In recent months, the decentralized derivatives platform has become one of the most active cryptocurrency trading platforms, helped by demand for 24-hour markets linked to crypto assets, commodities, stocks and other synthetic instruments.
This has become especially evident during the ongoing war between the US, Israel and Iran, where traders used Hyperliquid to hedge their exposure to oil, gold, silver and US stocks while traditional markets were closed.
That growth has drawn more attention from policymakers and traditional market participants such as CME Group and ICE’s New York Stock Exchange.
Their concerns center on market surveillance, jurisdiction, manipulation risk, sanctions compliance, and whether public blockchain derivatives must operate within a regulatory framework designed for centralized exchanges.
In response to this research, Hyperliquid has increased its policy presence in Washington.
Last week, the platform’s founder, Jeff Yan, said said that he met with US lawmakers to discuss on-chain derivatives and a regulatory pathway to bring blockchain-based trading markets to the US.
Yan said some conversations were technical, while others focused on decentralized finance and the demand for onchain markets. He added that he saw bipartisan interest in crypto regulation and expected discussions to continue.
The Hyperliquid Policy Center has done just that pushed back against criticism from established exchanges, arguing that the platform’s ledger creates a complete real-time record of transactions. The group has said transparency can help surveillance, detection and investigation by regulators and law enforcement agencies.
That argument is now being tested against more complex products, such as a SpaceX pre-IPO offender, which raises different questions than a Bitcoin or Ethereum contract.