Hyperliquid clears $1.4B in SpaceX perps as 3 exchanges run out of shares

Hyperliquid cleared $1.4 billion in SpaceX perpetual futures on the company's Nasdaq debut, while Binance, Bybit and Bitget canceled their tokenized SpaceX products after failing to secure enough shares.

"The perps are leading and so far those that have been listed before IPOs have done a pretty damn good job," David Schamis, founding partner at Atlas Merchant Capital and CEO of Hyperliquid Strategies, said.

More than 7 million SPCX perpetual contracts changed hands on Hyperliquid on June 12, with prices ranging from $153 to $180 before SpaceX's first trade printed at $150, according to exchange data compiled by CNBC. The stock closed at $160.95, giving the company a market capitalization above $2.1 trillion. About 500 million shares traded on Nasdaq for roughly $80 billion in equity volume, meaning Hyperliquid's perp volume represented about 1.7% of the primary market.

The episode exposed a structural weakness in tokenized equity products that rely on real-share custody. Bybit, Binance and Bitget had offered SpaceX exposure through xStocks, a Kraken product that converts real equities into blockchain tokens, but received no IPO allocation. A separate platform, preStocks, sold exposure to SpaceX shares only for buyers to discover a 180-day lockup after trading opened. Synthetic perpetual futures face no such constraints because they track price through funding rates rather than requiring underlying shares.

Hyperliquid's SPCX contract is part of its HIP-3 ecosystem, which posted $18.8 billion in cumulative volume across stock perpetuals in the first half of June, outpacing WTI and Brent crude perpetuals on the same platform. The exchange's native token, HYPE, gained roughly 10% on IPO day and is up more than 150% year to date, according to CoinMarketCap data.

The platform generated more than $15.6 million in fees during the past week, making it the third-largest protocol by weekly fees behind only stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, according to DefiLlama data.

The structural divide

The three exchanges that canceled on SpaceX day relied on a model that requires sourcing real shares before issuing tokenized equivalents. When xStocks received no IPO allocation, all three platforms collapsed simultaneously. Hyperliquid's synthetic model, which uses funding rate mechanisms to track the underlying price, had no allocation problem to solve.

"The bankers priced it perfectly — not too high, not too low," Jared Dillian, author of the Daily Dirtnap, said of the SpaceX IPO. "You want a little bit of a pop on the IPO to reward shareholders but if it's too big a pop, SpaceX would have left money on the table."

Regulatory attention grows

The success of crypto-native perpetuals has drawn scrutiny from traditional exchange operators. Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, urged regulators in May to create a "level playing field" for launching 24/7 onchain perpetual futures, arguing that regulators are "prohibiting us from doing this when it's already happening." Sprecher cited Hyperliquid by name in his comments.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently approved prediction market operator Kalshi to trade bitcoin perpetuals, a move that sent shares of CME Group, Cboe Global Markets and Nasdaq lower earlier this month as investors priced in competitive pressure from blockchain-based alternatives.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.