The Biggest Winner in the SpaceX IPO Might Be Hyperliquid
Price discovery for big IPOs like SpaceX seems to be working on Hyperliquid
By Zack Guzman
June 12, 2026
Weeks before SpaceX's record-setting IPO, plenty of investors were already trading.
It wasn't massive volume — at just about $20 million a day — but by the time SpaceX shares officially began trading on Friday, daily volumes had already ballooned to more than $1.2 billion on Hyperliquid.
More importantly, the popular perpetual futures exchange may have just proven yet again that it's a legitimate venue for price discovery — and potentially the missing solution that has always plagued the companies going public and the bankers representing them.
Even Elon Musk expressed his desire to buck the usual IPO process — opting to offer shares in SpaceX at a "take it or leave it" price of $135 a share, rather than going through the usual process of indicating a range, testing the waters with investors, and officially adjusting prices from there.
Weeks ago, the CEO of the leading Hyperliquid digital asset treasury company Hyperliquid Strategies had been appealing to Musk to avoid falling into a trap that has befallen a number of other IPOs in the past: Leaving too much money on the table.
Case in point, when AI company Cerebras was preparing to go public in May, Hyperliquid Strategies CEO David Schamis noticed pre-IPO pricing on Hyperliquid was indicating investors had ample appetite to speculate on shares heading higher. Even after Cerebras raised their initial target range of $115 to $125 a share to just under $160, investors on Hyperliquid were still willing to take the over.
And sure enough — despite Cerebras pricing above that at $185, CBRS shares still surged 68% in its debut to match where pricing generally was on Hyperliquid. As Schamis hoped in an interview with Coinage at the time — that would be a fairly important learning for Musk and Co. to consider in their IPO.
“The idea that we can't have price discovery before an IPO in some real way and that it's not meaningful is obviously ridiculous,” Schamis said in May. "When you look at the Cerebras IPO, Hyperliquid did a really nice job of predicting where it would trade post-IPO and I have no reason to believe that it won't be the same case for SpaceX."
So how did Hyperliquid hold up this time for the SpaceX IPO?
SPCX perpetual futures on Hyperliquid had traded lower since reports surfaced that Musk was targeting $135 a share in the IPO at the beginning of June — from just over $200 a share to eventually stabilize around $170 a share. SPCX was trading on Hyperliquid on June 5 at $161 a share. A week later, after much fanfare, wall-to-wall TV coverage, and protests in New York against the IPO, SpaceX saw shares on the Nasdaq close the day ... at $161 a share.
There is no doubt SpaceX's IPO is a big win for Elon Musk, who surpassed a personal net worth of $1 trillion on the day. It was also a big win for early SpaceX investors (and even late ones.) But for Hyperliquid, in its quest to prove out it can become the place for price discovery for all kinds of markets — even the largest IPOs in history — it was a pretty big win to be spot on.
“The breakout moment came with silver. It came with oil. And now it's coming with these IPOs,” Schamis said. “It's the sort of thesis of real world assets coming onchain in a big way.”
It was also a big win to actually effectuate a market at a time when other attempts to tokenize SpaceX shares failed Friday. Major exchange Bybit cancelled plans for delivering tokenized SpaceX stock to users after it said tokenization issuer xStocks failed to receive an allocation.
"Due to the xStocks' inability to deliver the underlying assets, Bybit did not receive any allocation," Bybit said in a notice. "As a result, all subscription funds will be refunded automatically." The exchange later compensated users with an additional 10% reward to make up for missing out. Bitget Wallet also failed to deliver tokenized SpaceX shares to users, though, to be fair, some traditional brokerages also failed to meet demand for SPCX among their retail customers.
For Hyperliquid, which uses a proportion of its protocol's trading fee revenue to buyback and burn its native token HYPE, more volumes generally mean better token performance. In theory, if more people tend to look to trade around these IPOs rather than other venues, that could continue to boost its price. So far, HYPE is up more than 135% this year.
