The Hottest Thing in Crypto Is... Tokenizing SpaceX Stock?

With SpaceX barreling towards the biggest IPO in history, everyone is clamoring for a piece of the action — even crypto.

Exchanges, tokenization platforms, and traders are all trying to answer the same question: How do you bring SpaceX stock onchain before most investors can even buy it?

The opportunity is enormous. SpaceX is targeting a public valuation of more than $1.7 trillion — which would be good enough to nearly match the entire market cap of Bitcoin at $2 trillion by itself. Interest from retail investors around the world continues to grow, and now, SpaceX has become the perfect test case for one of crypto's biggest themes in 2026: Tokenized equities.

But the rush to tokenize SpaceX is also exposing a deeper divide within the industry. On the spectrum of experimentation, there are the more conservative players who are waiting to issue post-IPO stock, and then there are those pushing the envelope by offering the ability to speculate on SpaceX via pre-IPO perpetual futures. Even Coinbase got into the mix by offering as much to its non-U.S. customers.

But to Brandon Ooi, co-founder at Dinari — one of the first tokenization firms to secure a broker-dealer license last year — things are starting to get a bit tenuous in the tokenization space.

"It's interesting to see ... pre-IPO trading of essentially fake shares of these things," Ooi told Coinage in a new interview. "Some of our competitors, they've chosen to be anything but a security."

Hyperliquid, arguably the hottest project in crypto right now for building out the home for tokenized trading, has been offering pre-IPO trading for SpaceX perpetual futures for weeks. Volumes topped $10 million most days last week, but trading turned volatile on June 2 after a report indicated that SpaceX was hoping to price shares at $135 a pop. On thin volume, trading in the SPCX-USDC market wicked down from $191 to $181.

"There are certainly traders that think that they are real shares," Ooi said. "That's a problem."

Last week on Coinage, Hyperliquid Strategies CEO David Schamis defended the growing market for pre-IPO trading, saying allowing traders to speculate on the future value of companies like SpaceX before shares are publicly available can help companies and banks in the roadshow process to find a more fair price.

"When you have a great company and you want to take it public, you go through the IPO process and it's not it's not a great process, in my opinion," Schamis said. "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."

For her part as SEC Commissioner, Hester Peirce pushed back recently on some of the experimentation happening with tokenization, which was a rare sight for the leading pro-crypto voice at the SEC. In a public tweet, Commissioner Peirce said, "I appreciate the interest in — but not the hyperbole about — the contemplated innovation exemption for the onchain trading of tokenized NMS stock."

She went on to say, "Keep in mind: I've always expected that it'd be limited in scope & would facilitate trading only of digital representations of the same underlying equity security that an investor could purchase in the secondary market today, not synthetics."

The notice gets to the heart of a debate now unfolding across crypto.

Many of the products currently offering exposure to companies aren't actually shares at all. Instead, they're often derivatives, prediction markets, debt instruments, or synthetic representations designed to track the value of an asset without conveying legal ownership.

That may sound like a technical distinction. Ooi argues it's much more important than that.

"Our tokens are meant to be one and the same as the security, just a different technology rail that you use," he said, noting that his company issues tokenized equities that are 1:1 backed by actual shares held in third-party brokerage accounts.

Dinari's approach has been to build what Ooi describes as a bridge between traditional financial infrastructure and blockchain rails. Rather than replacing the existing system, the company is attempting to bring existing securities onto blockchain networks while maintaining the same regulatory protections and ownership rights associated with traditional shares.

But with such a big IPO coming to market, it seems like some speculators can't wait for SpaceX to list before taking a stab at trading. Trailing 24-hour volumes on Hyperliquid's pre-IPO SpaceX market were up four-fold to top $40 million on the last Friday before the suspected IPO date of June 12.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project.