One of the biggest stock market debuts in history is six weeks away, and crypto is sitting in the same pool of liquidity that it will attract interest from.
SpaceX filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC earlier this month seeking a $75 billion capital raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation.
If it prices anywhere near that level in its expected IPO in June, the offering will be more than 2.5 times larger than Saudi Aramco’s record $29 billion in 2019, making it the biggest stock market debut in history. Polymarket traders assign a 65% probability of a June IPO and a 53% probability of first-day market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion.
SpaceX is not alone. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is aiming for a Q4 listing at a valuation near $1 trillion. Anthropic is reportedly planning an October debut that could raise more than $60 billion.
If all three hit the public market on schedule, they would pull in more than $240 billion from June through the end of the year, a figure that PitchBook estimates exceeds every venture-backed U.S. IPO combined since 2000.
“After the SpaceX IPO, I think you start to get very bearish stocks. It’s the Solana $300 moment,” said Alex Good, founder of crypto AI project Post Fiat, in a recent CounterParty TV interview.
“Right now we’re in this max-bid moment, every investment bank is going to upgrade every AI stock because they’re going to get so many fees out of these IPOs.”
Good’s framing captures the mechanical setup where the three biggest quotes could be concentrated in a six-month window, followed by coordinated sell-side optimism from the banks running the trades and followed by the rotation out.
MSCI, the firm that builds many of the benchmark stock indexes that institutional portfolios track, modeled a scenario in February in which flagged megacap IPOs in 2026 could trigger index-driven flows measured in billions of dollars, sector rotation effects across global benchmarks and a compression of liquidity in total outside the new names.
Crypto sits in the same risk-based liquidity pool that funds tech and AI stocks.
Bitcoin, ether and the rest of the majors have traded in tighter correlation to the Nasdaq and S&P 500 over the past two cycles. When speculative capital exits stocks for an IPO allocation, some of what exits is the same capital that would otherwise bid up higher beta assets, including crypto.
However, the historical parallel is cause for concern. Coinbase listed on April 14, 2021 at the peak of the last bitcoin cycle. Bitcoin hit its all-time high of around $64,800 on the same day and began a 50% pullback within six weeks.
Traders who read Coinbase’s IPO as a signal that crypto was going mainstream spent the next six months watching mainstream capital rotate out. The lesson is that institutional milestones often mark peaks rather than baselines because the capital chasing the milestone is the same capital that previously held the asset.
SpaceX is not a crypto company, but two features of the listing connect directly to cryptoflows. First, the 30% retail allocation, about $22 billion of the $75 billion offering, is three times the typical retail share of a deal of this size.
Such a retail allocation to SpaceX is money that does not offer memecoins, altcoins or bitcoin itself.
Second, SpaceX itself holds 8,285 BTC worth about $600 million in Coinbase Prime custody, making its IPO the first public market debut for a company with a significant bitcoin position disclosed under the new fair value accounting rules that took effect in late 2024.
The testable signal going forward is whether crypto holds up through the roadshow window in May and June or begins to slide lower as allocators clear space for the SpaceX subscription.
However, a bitcoin rally extending through the roadshow suggests that the spot ETF bid has decoupled crypto from broader risk flows.
Coinbase’s April 2021 peak was one company and $86 billion in market capitalization absorbed in a single day. SpaceX at $75 billion is not a scaled-up Coinbase. It’s a different event, priced for a market that has had five years to learn from the last one.
Whether crypto treats the lesson as learned or relearns it will be visible on the tape starting about six weeks from now.
