With six weeks to go before one of the biggest stock market debuts in history, cryptocurrencies are sitting in the same liquidity pools that will attract interest.
Earlier this month, SpaceX submitted a confidential S-1 document to the SEC with the goal of raising $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion.
If the price it expects to list in June is close to that level, the size of the offering will be more than 2.5 times Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $29 billion, making it the largest stock market debut in history. Polymarket traders predict a 65% chance of listing in June and a 53% chance of a market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion on the first day.
SpaceX is not alone. ChatGPT maker OpenAI aims to go public in the fourth quarter with a valuation of nearly $1 trillion. Anthropic reportedly plans to debut in October and raise more than $60 billion.
If all three hit the public markets as planned, they would have raised more than $240 billion from June to the end of the year, a figure that PitchBook estimates exceeds all venture-backed U.S. IPOs since 2000 combined.
Alex Good, founder of crypto-artificial intelligence project Post Fiat, said in a recent interview with CounterParty TV: “After the SpaceX IPO, I think stocks started to become very bearish. This is Solana’s $300 moment.”
“Now we’re in a max bid moment where every investment bank is going to upgrade every AI stock because they’re going to get so many fees from these IPOs.”
Goode’s framework captures a mechanical setup in which the three largest listings are likely to cluster within a six-month window, preceded by sell-side optimism coordinated by the banks operating the deals and then rotated.
Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), which builds institutional portfolios on many benchmark stock indexes, modeled a scenario in February that suggested large-cap IPOs in 2026 could trigger index-driven flows measured in billions of dollars, industry rotation effects on global benchmarks, and a liquidity squeeze across all assets except new names.
Cryptocurrencies are part of the same risky liquidity pool that funds tech and artificial intelligence stocks.
Over the past two cycles, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major currencies have seen increasing correlations with the Nasdaq and S&P 500. When speculative capital leaves stocks for IPO allocations, some of the capital left behind is the same capital that would otherwise drive up higher-beta assets, including cryptocurrencies.
However, the historical parallels are a cause for concern. Coinbase listed on April 14, 2021, at the peak of the previous Bitcoin cycle. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of around $64,800 that day and began a 50% decline in six weeks.
Traders who viewed Coinbase’s IPO as a sign that cryptocurrencies were heading toward the mainstream spent the next six months watching the turn of mainstream capital. The lesson is that institutional milestones often mark the top rather than the starting line because the capital chasing the milestone is the same capital that held the asset previously.
SpaceX is not a cryptocurrency company, but two features of the listing are directly related to cryptocurrency flows. First, the 30% retail allocation, or about $22 billion of the $75 billion offering, is three times the typical retail share in a deal of this size.
This retail funding allocated to SpaceX is not a bid for memecoins, altcoins, or Bitcoin itself.
Second, SpaceX itself holds 8,285 Bitcoins under Coinbase Prime custody, worth approximately $600 million, making it the first public market debut of a company disclosing a significant Bitcoin position under new fair value accounting rules that take effect at the end of 2024.
A testable signal going forward is whether the cryptocurrency will hold steady during the May and June roadshow window or start to move lower as allocators make room for SpaceX subscriptions.
However, Bitcoin’s rally during the roadshow suggests that spot ETF bids have decoupled the cryptocurrency from broader risk flows.
Coinbase’s peak in April 2021 was when the company absorbed $86 billion in market capitalization in a single day. SpaceX, valued at $75 billion, is not a scaled-up Coinbase. This is a different type of event and the market has learned five years of lessons from the previous event.
Whether crypto sees this as a lesson learned, or learned it again, will be seen on tape in about six weeks.
