SpaceX priced its IPO tonight at $135 per share, valuing Elon Musk’s rocket company at $1.77 trillion ahead of tomorrow’s Nasdaq debut under SPCX. It will be the largest IPO in financial history.
A different group of traders has been long SpaceX for weeks already. Not through a brokerage. Through pre-IPO perpetual futures on onchain platforms like Velvet Capital and Hyperliquid. Those contracts were tracking SpaceX’s implied valuation around $200 per share. The IPO just priced at $135.
VELVET, the utility token for Velvet Capital’s onchain terminal, is up 1,232% over the past seven days. It hit an all-time high earlier today before cooling. It is now trading around $1.60 with a market cap of $617 million.
VELVET ran from under $0.25 to $1.60 in seven days as SpaceX pre-IPO perpetuals drove demand for Velvet Capital’s onchain terminal. Source: CoinGecko
What Actually Happened Here
Velvet Capital launched synthetic pre-IPO perpetual futures for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic after integrating with Trade.xyz on June 3. The product lets traders take a leveraged position on where a private company will trade when it goes public, settled in stablecoins, from their own wallet, with no brokerage account, no KYC, and no allocation waitlist.
The narrative was clean. Millions of retail investors could not get SpaceX allocation through traditional channels. Velvet gave them a way in. The token that captures fees and platform activity from that product ran accordingly.
But here is the part worth sitting with. Onchain traders had SpaceX at roughly $200. Goldman Sachs and the underwriters just priced it at $135. That is a 32% gap between what the crypto market implied and what Wall Street decided the company is worth.
That gap resolves one of two ways when SPCX opens tomorrow. Either SpaceX pops hard above $135 and the onchain traders look prescient. Or it opens near the IPO price and the perpetuals market turns out to have been running well ahead of reality.
The Thesis That Is Bigger Than This One Token
We have been tracking this dynamic for a while. A pseudonymous wallet turned $28,000 into $3 million trading Micron and Intel stock perps on Hyperliquid with no broker, no KYC, no clearing house. Earlier this month, Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan made the case that Hyperliquid is not a crypto app but a financial super app targeting the $600 trillion global asset market.
The thesis across all three stories is the same. Onchain infrastructure has solved the access problem. Semiconductor stock perps. Pre-IPO SpaceX exposure. 24/7 oil futures when ICE is closed. Anyone with a wallet can get in.
What has not been solved is pricing accuracy. The $3 million Micron trade is the wins side of the ledger. Onchain markets pricing SpaceX at $200 before an IPO that came in at $135 is the open question.
What the VELVET Chart Is Actually Saying
$617 million market cap. $674,000 in TVL. The token is pricing in a future where Velvet becomes the default destination for trading the next generation of pre-IPO names. That future may arrive. But at 1,232% in seven days, the people who made real money here were in well before this week.
Tomorrow is the test. Not just for SpaceX. For whether onchain pre-IPO markets can price the world’s biggest assets accurately, or whether they are a sentiment amplifier that runs ahead of reality and snaps back when reality prices.
Watch where SPCX opens. VELVET will notice.
