Elon Musk hasn't rung the opening bell yet, but crypto traders have already turned SpaceX into one of the year's biggest speculative plays.
Over the past few weeks, exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, and Hyperliquid rolled out so-called pre-IPO perpetual futures on SpaceX. The contracts let anyone bet on the company's future share price without owning a single share or waiting for the IPO itself.
Perpetual futures, or "perps," are a familiar tool in crypto trading. They track the price of an asset indefinitely, never expire, and let traders borrow money to size up their positions. Exchanges have now bolted that same mechanic onto SpaceX, pricing the contracts off the company's last known private valuation rather than a listed share price.
The scale caught even seasoned market watchers off guard. Data provider Talos tracked roughly $3.2 billion in trading volume and $390 million in open interest across eight exchanges offering SpaceX perps in under a month. Binance reported $2.1 billion in trading volume on its own platform in just 18 days, without disclosing where the money came from.
Open interest surges like this aren't unique to SpaceX either. A similar dynamic played out in Shiba Inu's futures market, where open interest climbed even as spot prices fell, a pattern that shows how leverage and speculation can move independently of an asset's actual value.
Philippe Noeltner, a lawyer at A&O Shearman, called the volume mind-boggling, noting the product is clearly built for a crypto-native audience chasing high-leverage bets rather than long-term investors. Leverage on the SpaceX contracts caps at 3x to 5x, modest by crypto standards where 100x isn't unusual, but still enough to sharpen swings in either direction.
The rise of pre-IPO perps isn't just a crypto story. It's rattling traditional finance too. Shares in Intercontinental Exchange, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, dropped earlier this month after word spread that U.S. regulators were preparing to greenlight crypto-based perpetual futures more broadly. The sell-off continued the following session, driven in part by concern that similar products could eventually extend to ordinary equities.
That fear isn't hypothetical. SpaceX is only the opening act. A wave of blockbuster listings is expected to follow, including AI heavyweights Anthropic and OpenAI, both likely candidates for this same kind of synthetic, exchange-listed speculation.
Institutional scepticism toward crypto-adjacent bets isn't new either. JPMorgan has pushed back on Strategy's Bitcoin treasury approach, arguing that trust in a crypto-heavy balance sheet has to be earned, not assumed. The same tension is playing out now with SpaceX perps: exchanges are moving fast, but the institutions on the other side of the table are asking harder questions.
Supporters argue pre-IPO perps serve a genuine purpose: they give traders outside the U.S., where these products are largely unavailable, a way to participate in the gains of a hot private company before Wall Street opens the door, while helping the market form a price ahead of the actual listing.
Critics see it differently. Because the contracts aren't tied to any underlying shares and liquidity can be thin, prices can swing on sentiment alone rather than on anything resembling company fundamentals. That volatility is already showing up: SpaceX pre-IPO perps have slid from above $200 to around $160 in under a month, according to Kaiko pricing data, even as SpaceX itself was expected to price its IPO at roughly $135 per share.
Kaiko analyst Laurens Fraussen argues the contract isn't anchored to anything beyond pure speculation, comparing the trend to the broader rise of prediction markets, part of a wider shift toward turning almost everything into a bet.
The World Federation of Exchanges, which represents global stock exchanges, has flagged similar concerns to regulators, warning that buyers may wrongly assume these products carry the same protections as listed securities, when how reliably their prices reflect real value is far from guaranteed.
Perhaps the strangest part of the story is how little anyone actually knows about who's behind the volume. Both Coinbase and Binance declined to disclose user numbers for their SpaceX products, and Talos said the data simply isn't available from the outside.
As Noeltner put it, there's no way to tell whether a given trade is a retail investor risking a small amount or a hedge fund building a much larger position, and it would be a mistake to assume it's mostly the former.
Institutional appetite for this kind of exposure is already well documented elsewhere in crypto. BlackRock, for instance, kept buying Bitcoin even as its spot ETF saw outflows, a reminder that large players often move quietly in the same markets retail traders assume they've cornered.
London Business School professor Alex Edmans, who studies investor psychology, frames the appeal simply: both SpaceX and crypto are compelling narratives that draw people in emotionally, whether that's belief in the future of space exploration or in blockchain's next use case. But a good story, he cautions, still doesn't tell you what an asset is actually worth, something traders piling into these contracts may want to sit with before increasing their exposure.
Pre-IPO perps have proven they can move fast, attract serious volume, and rattle traditional exchanges in the process. Whether they end up as a legitimate price-discovery tool or a cautionary tale of leverage chasing a good story probably won't be clear until the next wave, Anthropic and OpenAI included, puts the model to the test.
Did Wall Street just use the largest IPO in history as exit liquidity? SpaceX didn't rocket on its Nasdaq-100 debut—it dropped 6.8%, exposing the brutal friction between institutional profit-taking and mechanical index tracking. The latest KuCoin blog breaks down the complex Show more
