MW Investors are flocking to an offshore crypto platform for an early shot at trading the SpaceX IPO
By Joseph Adinolfi and Christine Idzelis
SpaceX 'pre-IPO' perpetual futures launched earlier this week on Trade.xyz, offering some investors a way to trade what is expected to be the biggest IPO of all time
Eager to trade SpaceX? Now, you don't even need to wait for the IPO.
A fast-growing offshore market is giving investors around the world an opportunity to trade what is expected to be the biggest IPO in history before it even happens - all while completely bypassing Wall Street.
On May 17, Trade.xyz, a perpetual futures exchange built atop the Hyperliquid blockchain, launched a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract for SpaceX. The contract gave traders using the offshore platform the opportunity to speculate on the price of SpaceX ahead of the company's highly anticipated IPO.
SpaceX is aiming to raise $80 billion in an offering expected to take place on June 12, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal. Media reports have pegged the expected initial valuation at around $2 trillion.
Investors have flocked to platforms like Hyperliquid and Trade.xyz over the past few months. Many have been drawn by the fact that these markets are open 24/7, allowing traders to speculate on the price of oil and other real-world assets even when markets are closed over the weekend.
"It has become the go-to venue for price discovery for something you can't trade otherwise," said Stephen Coltman, head of macro at 21shares, about the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
Back in March, Trade.xyz obtained a license from S&P Dow Jones Indices to list a perpetual futures contract linked to the S&P 500 SPX.
Securing an allocation to a high-profile company like SpaceX before it goes public can be a challenge even for institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, Coltman told MarketWatch during an interview. But anybody can make pre-IPO bets using these derivatives contracts, he said. Trading on Hyperliquid and Trade.xyz is currently off-limits to investors based in the U.S. for regulatory reasons. But some U.S.-based traders have found workarounds, like using a virtual private network, or VPN, which can obscure a user's location.
Hyperliquid is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, according to PitchBook. But according to media reports, its employees are primarily based in Singapore.
A splashy debut
Attempts to offer investors exposure to hot private companies in cryptoland have yielded mixed results so far.
Earlier this month, another crypto-based exchange called PreStocks launched a pair of tokens on its platform atop the Solana blockchain that offered exposure to equity stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic held in a special purpose vehicle, or SPV.
But prices of those tokens cratered after people on social media pointed to guidance that OpenAI and Anthropic issued saying they wouldn't honor stakes that had been transferred to a third party using an SPV. PreStocks didn't respond when MarketWatch reached out for comment.
By offering trading in perpetual futures instead of tokenized stocks, Trade.xyz has sidestepped this risk. The futures contracts aren't moored to any underlying equity stake in the company. Instead, they simply allow traders to take directional bets on whether the price will go up, or down - with plenty of leverage to supercharge their wins, and losses. The platform uses reference rates to ensure the contracts remain fairly priced. All orders are routed through Hyperliquid's fully-decentralized order book and trade-clearing engines.
To be sure, the market action in perpetual futures is still tiny compared to daily trading volumes in the U.S. equity market. After launching with a reference price of $150, the SpaceX perpetual future spiked to $216 within hours, according to data available on Trade.xyz's platform, before settling at around $202.
The market drew $33 million in 24-hour volume and $21.8 million in open interest in its first session, according to data on Hyperliquid. Since then, the reference price of the SpaceX contract has mostly been chopping sideways. At last check, it was trading at around $203. Based on the share-count benchmark used by Trade.xyz, that would give SpaceX a valuation of about $2.4 trillion.
Efforts to reach Trade.xyz and Hyperliquid for comment were not immediately successful.
Of all the decentralized crypto exchanges focused on real-world assets, Trade.xyz was ranked No. 1 in terms of open interest, which recently stood at $2.3 billion, according to data from Loris Tools. In addition to providing the rails for platforms like Trade.xyz, Hyperliquid also has its own native decentralized exchange. But it is focused on crypto-native assets.
The SpaceX pre-IPO futures weren't Trade.xyz's first rodeo. The platform quietly introduced its first pre-IPO perpetual futures earlier this month, when it launched a contract tied to Cerebras Systems (CBRS), a buzzy semiconductor company and Nvidia (NVDA) competitor.
That product made a "big splash," said Ishmael Asad, a research analyst at Bitwise, in an interview. "It's purely a speculative machine," he added.
It also accurately presaged a big post-IPO runup in shares of Cerebras once they finally went public in the U.S, according to Coltman. On Reddit, some retail investors complained about not being allocated shares in the hot IPO.
James Van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research, told MarketWatch that he hade traded the Cerebras pre-IPO perpetual as volume surged ahead of its May 14 IPO.
Van Geelen said he went long when the reference price for the contract was around $190. As volume exploded in the hours before the IPO, that price surged to nearly $400.
"I think it's a new mechanism for price discovery, and not just for crypto," Van Geelen told MarketWatch in an exchange of messages on Whatsapp.
Hyperliquid's native crypto token, HYPE, has been one of the hottest cryptocurrency trades of 2026.
Interest in the token is strong enough that ETF companies 21shares and Bitwise recently launched ETFs that offered direct exposure.
The 21Shares Hyperliquid ETF THYP has surged 18.5% so far this week, according to FactSet data. HYPE tokens saw a solid price bump after the SpaceX token went live on Trade.xyz.
See: The year's hottest crypto play is helping investors bet on the future of trading
-Joseph Adinolfi -Christine Idzelis
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 20, 2026 17:51 ET (21:51 GMT)
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