SpaceX IPO Yet to Arrive, Crypto Perpetual Contracts Priced First

SpaceX officially filed for an IPO on May 20th, planning to raise up to $75 billion with a valuation of $1.8 trillion. Just two days before the public application, Trade.xyz had already launched perpetual contracts for SpaceX tracking on May 18th, with the current quote at around $200, priced and settled in the stablecoin USDC.

A perpetual contract is a derivative with no expiration date, where holders have no legal rights to the underlying company and must continuously pay a funding rate. However, supporters argue that such tools can aggregate real market demand signals before the official opening of the IPO. The case of Cerebras Systems provided evidence for this argument—Trade.xyz initially offered contracts at $175, which Cerebras ultimately priced at $185, with the contract quoting $340 an hour before Nasdaq opened, and the opening price was $350, showing a high degree of conformity.

The rise of this market is essentially a detour around traditional IPO access barriers. Hyperithm, a cryptocurrency hedge fund CEO Lloyd Lee, pointed out that Pre-IPO has always been an exclusive club for qualified investors and private equity funds, and the crypto track is opening this door to anyone with a wallet. He also said that less than 10% of the global population can directly access US stocks, and the percentage that can participate in Pre-IPO is even lower; perpetual contracts are of great significance to investors in areas with weak financial infrastructure. Mainstream exchanges such as Binance, Bitget, and OKX have all launched similar products this year.

However, risks should not be overlooked. D2 Finance's portfolio manager, Luca Parlamento, characterized these trades as basis trading, which is essentially betting on price differences before and after the IPO, rather than judging the company's fundamentals. There are no real stocks available for arbitrage before the listing, the funding rate may distort returns, and sharp price fluctuations may reflect more of a retail capital imbalance rather than the company's value. Previously, there was an incident on the Venteuals platform where pricing data input errors with SpaceX led to forced liquidation of user positions.

Despite this, Bitget CEO Gracy Chen stated that a considerable portion of traders in the current SpaceX perpetual contracts are holding positions rather than quickly flipping, showing some intent for long-term allocation.