SPCX on Hyperliquid: What Happens at IPO?

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SpaceX is approaching what is expected to be the largest initial public offering in history, targeting a valuation north of $1.7 trillion on June 12. While traditional private market exposure remains gated to accredited investors and institutions, DeFi protocols - in particular, Hyperliquid, give retail traders an alternative.

However, these contracts do not represent SpaceX stock, but merely track the price of them like a typical derivative. Furthermore, upon IPO, they do not become stock.

What Happens At IPO?

A common point of confusion among holders of these perpetual contracts is what exactly happens when the underlying company goes public.

After SpaceX completes its IPO, active SPCX positions on Hyperliquid transition into standard stock-linked perpetual futures - they do not become actual stock. The exposure shifts from a pre-IPO discovery mechanism to a standard real-world asset (RWA) perpetual tracking the live price of SpaceX.

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The Cerebras IPO is a good case study that traders and investors can look to for information on what will happen at the IPO. Cerebras is an AI company that makes chips, semiconductors, and software for AI inference (the execution phase of artificial intelligence). Cerebras had its IPO in May and was valued at $34 billion.

The pre-IPO perpetual for CBRS provided accurate price discovery, trading within 1.3% of the eventual Nasdaq opening price before converting into a standard perpetual contract post-listing.

As the June listing date nears, SPCX has evolved into a real-time oracle for both institutional underwriters and retail speculators. With massive open interest concentrated across Hyperliquid, the platform is in the process of establishing itself as a primary venue for pre-market price discovery. Read our report into the HYPE flywheel, which touches on the positive network effects of these pre-IPO contracts. 

The SpaceX perpetual contract on Hyperliquid is deployed by TradeXYZ. TradeXYZ is a decentralized, non-custodial trading interface built on top of the Hyperliquid blockchain. TradeXYZ has staked 500K of HYPE (approx. $28 million) in order to deploy markets on Hyperliquid and their contracts currently account for 94% of HIP-3 Open Interest.

Despite the $1.7 trillion target, the SPCX HIP-3 contract implies a valuation of $2.01 trillion and a share price of $154. This premium exists for a few reasons: SpaceX is a gatekept asset that most traders have been unable to gain exposure to - the perp contract has changed that and attracted considerable interest. Speculation about a post-IPO pump is also driving the valuation up, combined with the ability to easily use leverage.

SpaceX will become the eighth largest publicly traded BTC treasury company after its IPO. It disclosed that it holds 18,712 BTC in an S-1 filing published in May.

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HIP-3

Hyperliquid's HIP-3 upgrade - which went live in October 2025 - enabled anyone who passed on-chain requirements (staking 500K HYPE) to deploy perpetual futures markets on basically anything. In practice, this meant a huge proliferation of markets relating to real-world assets (RWAs) like stocks and commodities. 

Traders can now speculate on things like SpaceX's valuation using the SPCX pre-IPO perpetual contract. Launched by Trade.xyz, the USDC-settled SPCX contract allows anyone to take long or short positions on the implied share price of SpaceX. 

It has been extremely popular. Current open interest for the SPCX-USDC trading pair on Hyperliquid is over $100 million. 

HyperEVM - which is Hyperliquid’s smart contract layer - is now a supported chain on Arkham Intel. This means you can track HYPE whales and top holders, and use all of Arkham Intel’s features with HyperEVM data.

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