top of page
4Artboard 3_2x_edited_edited.png

The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

Four Exchanges Refund $1bn After SpaceX Token Scramble

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jun 23
  • 4 min read

The first big test of tokenised equity exposed the gap between onchain demand and the real shares behind it.


When SpaceX finally went public on 12 June, the moment was meant to belong to the rocket company. For anyone watching tokenised equity, it turned into something else. A stress test. And the plumbing did not pass cleanly. SpaceX listed on Nasdaq as SPCX after raising around $75 billion at an implied valuation of $1.75 trillion. Appetite for exposure was enormous, and a good slice of it was onchain. Several crypto exchanges had told customers they could buy tokenised SpaceX shares the moment trading opened. Then the promise came apart. Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC cancelled their tokenised SpaceX offerings and refunded more than $1 billion in customer orders, after the supplier they all leaned on could not secure shares in a wildly oversubscribed deal. The mechanism behind the failure is the part worth understanding, because it is not unique to SpaceX. The four exchanges had routed their offerings through a single shared intermediary, xStocks. Onchain, demand aggregates almost instantly. Off-chain, the shares have to be procured the old way: sequentially, with permission, and against a hard supply limit. Pre-IPO and IPO allocations sit with a small set of underwriters who had no obligation whatsoever to hand inventory to a crypto intermediary in a deal everyone wanted a piece of. The interface said the shares were available. The cap table said otherwise. Not every platform got caught out. Backpack, Ondo and Dinari did offer tokenised SpaceX exposure, and they did it by refusing to make the promise the others made. Backpack bought shares directly as a regulated US broker-dealer and launched its SPCX token on Solana on listing day, backed one fo

When SpaceX finally went public on 12 June, the moment was meant to belong to the rocket company. For anyone watching tokenised equity, it turned into something else. A stress test. And the plumbing did not pass cleanly.


SpaceX listed on Nasdaq as SPCX after raising around $75 billion at an implied valuation of $1.75 trillion. Appetite for exposure was enormous, and a good slice of it was onchain. Several crypto exchanges had told customers they could buy tokenised SpaceX shares the moment trading opened. Then the promise came apart. Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC cancelled their tokenised SpaceX offerings and refunded more than $1 billion in customer orders, after the supplier they all leaned on could not secure shares in a wildly oversubscribed deal.


The mechanism behind the failure is the part worth understanding, because it is not unique to SpaceX. The four exchanges had routed their offerings through a single shared intermediary, xStocks. Onchain, demand aggregates almost instantly. Off-chain, the shares have to be procured the old way: sequentially, with permission, and against a hard supply limit. Pre-IPO and IPO allocations sit with a small set of underwriters who had no obligation whatsoever to hand inventory to a crypto intermediary in a deal everyone wanted a piece of. The interface said the shares were available. The cap table said otherwise.


Not every platform got caught out. Backpack, Ondo and Dinari did offer tokenised SpaceX exposure, and they did it by refusing to make the promise the others made. Backpack bought shares directly as a regulated US broker-dealer and launched its SPCX token on Solana on listing day, backed one for one by real stock it actually held. Its token crossed 10,000 holders within days, running ahead of the intermediated version. The difference was not better marketing. It was proof of assets.


That is the lesson hiding inside the noise. A token's ticker and a clean trading screen guarantee nothing about what sits underneath. Until a provider can show custodied shares and finalised allocations, a subscription is an expression of intent, not an entitlement to anything. The token is only ever as good as the share behind it.


Why should a founder in Bristol or a fund in Leeds care about a Solana token tracking an American rocket maker?


Because the UK is busy building its own version of exactly this plumbing. PISCES, the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, went live this year, with the London Stock Exchange first through the door and the opening auction completed in March. The promise is the same one the crypto exchanges made: liquidity in private company shares, reached more directly.


The SpaceX episode is a free warning that the front end is the easy bit. The share register, the custody arrangement and the legal link between a token and the equity it claims to represent are where the real work lives, and where the model either holds or breaks.


There is a constructive reading here, and it is the right one. This is a maturing pain, not a verdict on the idea. Tokenised equity that works is entirely possible, and Backpack's approach shows the shape of it: a real share, properly custodied, with a clean legal claim, then a token on top. The versions that fail are the ones that treat the token as the product and the share as a detail to sort out later. Demand will keep arriving faster than supply for any genuinely scarce asset. The infrastructure that survives is the kind that can prove what it holds before it sells access to it.


For founders the deeper point sits one level down. Tokenised equity is not just a faster way to trade shares. It changes who can hold a stake in your company and on what terms. Build that on weak foundations and you inherit the weakness, in your cap table and in the trust your backers place in it. Build it properly and the same technology starts to do something more useful: it lets you widen who can invest, manage secondary liquidity for early supporters, and keep control of the relationships that matter as you scale. SpaceX did not need any of this. The next thousand founders who want the option will, and they should watch closely what just broke and why.


Key Takeaways

  • SpaceX listed on Nasdaq as SPCX on 12 June, raising around $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, and onchain demand for exposure was immediate and huge.

  • Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC cancelled tokenised SpaceX offerings and refunded over $1 billion after their shared supplier, xStocks, could not secure shares in an oversubscribed IPO.

  • The failure was an intermediary and supply problem: onchain demand aggregates instantly, while real shares are procured slowly, with permission, against a fixed allocation controlled by underwriters.

  • Backpack, Ondo and Dinari avoided the trap by holding real shares first; Backpack bought stock directly as a regulated broker-dealer and its SPCX token passed 10,000 holders.

  • For the UK's PISCES era, the takeaway is plain: the token is only as good as the custodied share and clean legal claim behind it, and that is where tokenised equity is won or lost.

Sources

Comments

bottom of page