[███░░░░]: SpaceX IPO Week: A Billion Dollars of Demand, Not Enough Shares

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 1196 relevant tokenization news stories from the week, analyzed the key stories on our weekly podcast, then distilled what you need to know into a few hundred words in this newsletter. Delivered to your inbox in time for Friday happy hour in NYC (usually).

Let's Kill "Tokenization"

Stay with me.

Tokenization describes the act of converting something into a token. It says nothing about why you did it, who benefits, or what feature it enables. It's the equivalent of Bezos positioning Amazon as a "Python-based bookstore" when the actual story was the everything store, AWS, and the infrastructure of modern commerce. The technology was real. The label was wrong.

What I actually care about is the feature set. Digitally native cash flows. 24/7 redemption. Composability with DeFi protocols. Onchain price discovery. Permissionless access for non-US retail. These are the things worth talking about. The substrate being a blockchain is incidental to any of them from a user perspective.

And I think the space is maturing into this understanding. The folks who are winning are not the ones talking about tokenization. They're the ones launching products with specific yield targets, specific liquidity facilities, and specific user experiences. Grove, Multiliquid (full disclosure, I'm an investor), Symbiotic, the wave of liquidity infrastructure being built right now: none of them lead with "we tokenize assets." They lead with "here's your yield, here's your daily liquidity, here's why it's better than what you had."

The people who are still leading with tokenization as the pitch are, I think, going to have a harder and harder time as the market gets more sophisticated. Abstract away the buzzword. Get to the feature. That's what wins.

So do we just become "Asset Coalition"? I need to think on it...

Before we get into it, let's check the metrics.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was up 2.2% WoW to $32.5 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: USYC added $55M to reach $2.7 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $280M up to $3.1 billion

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down ~15 basis points WoW to $297 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USD1 added $290M up to $3.6 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: HyperEVM added $370M to $5.6 billion (fourth consecutive week as chain winner, also hit a new all-time high)

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.63%
Aave / DeFi: 3.45% (down 16 basis points WoW, now back below the off-chain rate)

Stories we're tracking this week

A lot happened this week at the intersection of traditional finance and onchain markets. The SpaceX IPO touched almost every corner of the tokenized equity space simultaneously, and the results were instructive even where they were messy.

• SpaceX priced what is being called the biggest IPO in history, and onchain markets showed up in force. Hyperliquid's SpaceX perpetual market hit $300 million in open interest and nearly $1 billion in 24-hour volume. Combined wallet-based subscription programs from Binance, Bybit, and BitGet aggregated close to $1 billion in retail demand for IPO allocation. The channel is real, even if this week's execution wasn't.
• xStocks canceled its SpaceX IPO subscription programs on Binance, Bybit, and BitGet wallets after failing to secure adequate allocation, refunding all participants. Binance's program alone had drawn nearly $600 million in subscriptions. XStocks ended up with roughly $33 million in actual SpaceX shares, with Kraken's own exchange customers likely receiving priority. No customer funds were lost, but the gap between solicited demand and delivered allocation was jarring and exposed loose pre-IPO terms that lacked XStocks' standard one-for-one backing language.
• Pre-Stocks, a Solana-based pre-IPO tokenization platform, saw its SpaceX token depeg more than 40% after the IPO, settling around a 30% discount to the underlying shares as of this writing. The cause: a 180-day post-IPO lockup that applied to the underlying SPV shares, a standard institutional term that was not prominently surfaced to secondary buyers who purchased the token on Jupiter or Meteora. Holders are now locked until approximately 173 days post-IPO, and liquidity is thin. The discount is mathematically interesting for those who can construct a hedge, but the disclosure failure is the story.
• Coinbase announced tokenized US equities for non-US customers, backed one-to-one through its licensed US broker-dealer, with full shareholder rights including dividends and voting. Coinbase explicitly positioned this against competitor products it described as debt securities or equity swaps that skirt regulation. The likely structure has the BD custodying shares onshore while an offshore SPV issues the token, putting Coinbase's regulatory licenses squarely behind the backing. Combined with the existing Coinbase-Morpho integration, this opens a path toward borrowing against tokenized equity positions onchain.
• Fidelity launched a stablecoin reserve fund product designed to comply with the Genius Act's reserve requirements, holding short-duration Treasuries, overnight repos, and money market instruments. State Street followed within 48 hours with a substantially similar product. The pair joins BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan in what is becoming a crowded field of qualified reserve asset funds targeting the $297 billion stablecoin market. Vanguard remains conspicuously absent and is not expected to enter.

Tweet of the Week

Tomorrow.

@coinbase (Coinbase 🛡️)

Likes: 6887 | Retweets: 507 | Replies: 861 | Quotes: 240

The Knicks Won and Everything Else Was Complicated

This week on The First Trillion, Johnny and Charlie broke down a wild week centered on the SpaceX IPO, covering xStocks' canceled subscription programs, the Pre-Stocks lockup depeg, and Coinbase's well-structured entry into tokenized equities for non-US customers. Oh, and the Knicks won the NBA championship, which had nothing to do with RWAs but everything to do with why New York was electric this week.

The episode is available below and we've summarized it for you here.

Stay ahead of the curve

Be sure to follow us on X, LinkedIn, and Spotify for real-time updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and the occasional hot take that didn't make it into the Progress Bar or the First Trillion podcast episode or summary.

Until next week,

The TAC Team