Hyperliquid’s HYPE jumped 7% in the past 24 hours even as majors tokens dropped and bitcoin slid under $77,000 in Asian morning hours Monday.
The move came as Trade.xyz launched SPCX-USDC, a pre-IPO perpetual futures contract tracking the market-implied price of Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s common stock, on Hyperliquid’s order book at around 5:16 AM UTC.
The contract launched with a reference price of $150 and an initial market cap of $1.78 trillion, based on SpaceX’s reported fully diluted share count of 11.87 billion.
This sits inside the $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion range SpaceX is targeting for its public offering, as CoinDesk reported earlier this month after the company filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1.
SpaceX is also holding 8,285 bitcoin in Coinbase Prime custody, a position that will appear in public filings for the first time once the S-1 lands and will require a fair-value accounting decision under the FASB rules that took effect in late 2025.
SPCX spiked to $216 within hours of launch before settling at $202.89, up 12.72% on the day, per Trade.xyz data. The market drew $33 million in 24-hour volume and $21.8 million in open interest in its first session.
SPCX is a synthetic perpetual, which means no actual SpaceX shares change hands. Traders bet on the implied price of the underlying stock through a derivative that tracks a reference valuation, with funding rates and oracle-fed price feeds keeping the contract anchored to its reference.
Perpetual futures are derivatives without an expiry date, with positions held open as long as the trader posts margin and pays or receives funding based on whether the contract trades above or below the spot reference.
That mechanism sidesteps the legal problem that blew up the spot pre-IPO token market earlier in the morning.
Anthropic and OpenAI’s tokenized stock products on PreStocks crashed roughly 50% last week, as CoinDesk reported, after both companies issued warnings that any transfer of their shares through special purpose vehicles or tokenized instruments is void under their corporate bylaws.
The PreStocks model relied on SPVs holding actual shares, which is the structure the companies say is invalid. A synthetic perpetual has no underlying shares to transfer, which means there is nothing for the private company to invalidate.
SPCX is the first of what Trade.xyz said will be a series of pre-IPO perpetual markets on the platform.
Whether the synthetic perpetual model holds up where the SPV model failed depends on whether private companies decide to pursue similar restrictions on derivative products that reference their valuation.
