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SpaceX's $75 billion IPO could drain the liquidity that's helping lift bitcoin and crypto

By Shaurya Malwa · Published April 24, 2026 · 6 min read · Source: CoinDesk
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SpaceX's $75 billion IPO could drain the liquidity that's helping lift bitcoin and crypto

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are set to raise more than $240 billion combined from June through year-end, a capital pull larger than every venture-backed US IPO since 2000 combined, and crypto sits in the same liquidity pool.

By Shaurya MalwaUpdated Apr 25, 2026, 5:24 a.m. Published Apr 24, 2026, 1:54 p.m. Make preferred on
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk

What to know:

One of the biggest stock-market debuts in history is six weeks away, and crypto sits in the same liquidity pool it will draw interest from.

SpaceX filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC earlier this month, targeting a $75 billion capital raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation.

If it prices anywhere near that level in its expected June listing, the offering will be more than 2.5 times larger than Saudi Aramco's $29 billion 2019 record, making it the biggest stock-market debut in history. Polymarket traders assign a 65% probability of a June listing and a 53% probability that the first-day closing market cap exceeds $2 trillion.

SpaceX isn't alone. ChatGPT maker OpenAI is targeting 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 reach the public market on schedule, they would pull in more than $240 billion from June through year-end, a figure PitchBook estimates exceeds every venture-backed US IPO combined since 2000.

"After the SpaceX IPO, I think you start to get very bearish equities. That's the Solana $300 moment," Alex Good, founder of crypto AI project Post Fiat, said on 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 much fees off of these IPOs."

Good's framing captures the mechanical setup, where the three largest listings could be concentrated in a six-month window, preceded by coordinated sell-side optimism from the banks running the deals and followed by the rotation out.

MSCI, the firm that builds many of the benchmark stock indexes institutional portfolios track, modeled a scenario in February that 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 everything outside the new names.

Crypto sits inside the same risk-on liquidity pool that funds tech and AI equities.

Bitcoin, ether, and the rest of the majors have traded with tightening correlation to Nasdaq and the S&P 500 over the past two cycles. When speculative capital leaves equities for an IPO allocation, some of what leaves is the same capital that would otherwise bid up higher-beta assets, including crypto.

The historical parallel is a point of concern, however. Coinbase listed on April 14, 2021 at the peak of the last bitcoin cycle. Bitcoin hit its all-time high of roughly $64,800 the same day and began a 50% drawdown 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 frequently mark tops rather than starting lines, because the capital that chases the milestone is the same capital that was previously holding up the asset.

SpaceX is not a crypto company, but two features of the listing connect directly to crypto flows. First, the 30% retail allocation, roughly $22 billion of the $75 billion offering, is three times the typical retail share on a deal this size.

Such a retail allocation nto SpaceX is money that's not bidding on memecoins, altcoins, or bitcoin itself.

Second, SpaceX itself holds 8,285 BTC worth roughly $600 million in Coinbase Prime custody, making its IPO the first public-market debut of a company with a material 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 drift lower as allocators free up room for the SpaceX subscription.

However, a bitcoin rally that extends through the roadshow suggests the spot-ETF bid has decoupled crypto from broader risk-on flows.

Coinbase's April 2021 peak was one company and $86 billion of market cap absorbed in a single day. SpaceX at $75 billion is not a scaled-up Coinbase. It is a different kind of event, priced into a market that has had five years to learn from the last one.

Whether crypto treats the lesson as learned or learns it again will be visible in the tape starting roughly six weeks from now.

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