Crypto IPO Plans Fall Flat: Users Left Empty‑Handed

The promise of a quick way into SpaceX’s hot IPO vanished when Binance, Bybit and Bitget pulled their tokenised stock offers. All three platforms had teamed up with xStocks, a company that was supposed to turn the company’s shares into crypto tokens. Customers had put more than $1 billion of orders in, hoping to buy SpaceX stock with crypto. Bybit was the first to launch a campaign on June 7, saying that users could get early access to SpaceX shares before normal trading. Binance followed on Thursday with a “non‑guaranteed” subscription, and Bitget announced the same plan on June 9. When SpaceX finally went public on Friday, none of the exchanges received any allocation from xStocks. Bybit explained that it had no shares to give and offered refunds plus a 10 % interest reward for four days. Binance cancelled its offer the same day, returned all locked USDC and promised to give $1 million worth of its own SpaceX tokens to participants by mid‑June. Bitget also refunded all affected users.The failure was huge. Binance alone had collected $557 million from almost 28, 000 addresses and then unwound the whole deal. Kraken users got a small amount of tokenised exposure, but most crypto customers received nothing at all. In the traditional market, SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO was over‑subscribed by more than four times; many brokerage customers got fewer shares, but at least some of them received a portion. The crypto platforms had no direct link to SpaceX’s underwriters; they relied entirely on xStocks. When that intermediary could not secure shares from the oversubscribed offering, the tokenised products collapsed. Industry voices questioned the model. A crypto exchange CEO suggested that tokens should be approved by the issuer itself, while an analyst from ARK Invest pointed out that many wallets were advertising SpaceX stock without explaining what was actually being bought. The situation highlighted a structural flaw: tokenised equity depends on centralised intermediaries, contrary to the original promise of decentralisation. Not all tokenised SpaceX products failed. The xStocks SPCXx token eventually launched after the IPO, and a Solana‑based token from PreStacks traded at a discount due to a six‑month lockup. Still, the episode came as the SEC had postponed plans to allow crypto firms to trade tokenised US stocks. The debacle showed that tokenised equities still rely heavily on traditional financial infrastructure, undermining claims of reduced dependence on trusted intermediaries.