The SpaceX IPO scramble brings early lesson for tokenized stocks

One person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that xStocks and its distribution partners gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders. But when underwriters finalized allocations, many of those requests went unfilled.

Binance, Bybit and Bitget received no shares and canceled their offerings. Meanwhile, customers of Kraken and xStocks received only a fraction of the allocations they requested.

The shortfall wasn’t limited to crypto platforms, though. Data compiled by Access IPOs showed some retail investors at traditional brokerages received only a portion of the shares they had sought.

An xStocks spokesperson said “overwhelming demand” prevented all orders from being fulfilled and that funds tied to unfilled subscriptions had been returned.

The firm’s tokenized SpaceX stock, trading under the ticker SPCXx, still launched after the IPO. About $24 million worth of the tokenized shares were circulating onchain at publication time, according to Arkham data. Ondo Finance and Dinari, which did not offer pre-IPO access, also launched tokenized SpaceX products following the company’s market debut.

Lesson for tokenized asset

The episode underscores a key lesson for tokenized assets. Creating a token is easy; securing the real asset behind it is the crucial part.

“What appears to have gone wrong… is that demand significantly exceeded the available supply of underlying shares,” a spokesperson for tokenization platform Dinari said. “If the underlying stock cannot be sourced, allocated and held within the necessary regulatory framework, there is ultimately no asset to tokenize.”