Elon Musk's SpaceX set its initial public offering price at $135 per share on June 3, 2026, aiming to sell 555.6 million shares and raise roughly $75 billion when it lists next week — the largest U.S. equity offering in years. Among the line items on the balance sheet going public: 18,712 bitcoin worth approximately $1.25 billion at bitcoin's current price of $67,000, making SpaceX one of the largest corporate BTC holders ever to enter public markets.
The pricing came through Reuters on the morning of June 3 and was confirmed by CoinDesk's live markets desk at 1:02 PM ET the same day. It lands in the middle of a bruising week for bitcoin: BTC is down roughly 9.5% over seven days, touching $65,300 overnight before bouncing back to the $66,600–$67,000 range Wednesday. SpaceX's 18,712 BTC position — already scrutinized by crypto traders tracking the balance sheet — drew fresh attention the moment the IPO price was set. A corporate treasury that was worth north of $1.5 billion when bitcoin traded near $80,000 in May is now a $1.25 billion line item heading into a public debut.
The BTC position in context
SpaceX's bitcoin holding puts it in company with a handful of public companies that have chosen to hold the asset on their balance sheets, most prominently Strategy, which has accumulated over 580,000 BTC. SpaceX's 18,712 BTC is smaller in absolute terms but substantial for a company going public in the middle of a correction. At $67,000 per coin, the position represents just under 1.7% of the total $75 billion raise — meaningful enough that analysts covering the IPO will have to address it in their models.
The timing sharpens that scrutiny. Bitcoin has now tested its February 6 low three times. The first two retests — February 24 and March 29 — held, with prices recovering above $70,000 and climbing to $83,000 by mid-May. Whether this third retest holds is unresolved as of the IPO pricing date. SpaceX's underwriters are bringing a company with a nine-figure BTC position to market during exactly the kind of price uncertainty that makes institutional allocators pause.
One theory circulating on social media Wednesday attributes part of this week's sell pressure not to Strategy liquidations but to Iranian entities dumping crypto assets ahead of U.S. sanctions. The Treasury Department last week froze more than $1 billion in Iranian crypto holdings, and on June 2 sanctioned Nobitex, Iran's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Analyst Alistair Milne wrote on X that coins with potential IRGC links were likely sold to avoid tainted-asset exposure, explaining "the feeling of constant sell pressure even at obvious support levels." SpaceX's IPO is entering a market where the cause of the BTC decline is still being debated.
Kraken's same-day play: tokenized IPO access
The SpaceX pricing was not the only crypto-adjacent IPO development on June 3. At 1:02 PM ET, CoinDesk reported that Payward — the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken — announced it would offer retail investors access to U.S.-listed IPOs at the offering price through tokenized shares, working through its xStocks Alliance.
The model works as follows: investors submit non-binding indications of interest before an IPO. Payward aggregates demand across participating exchanges and negotiates allocations with underwriting syndicates. Once a company lists, shares are tokenized one-for-one against the underlying stock held by a regulated custodian, then distributed through participating platforms. Payward said it will only offer IPOs where it has secured confirmed allocations — a deliberate constraint designed to distinguish the product from pre-IPO speculation.
The xStocks framework that underpins this offering is not new. Payward said the network has already processed more than $30 billion in transaction volume and $6 billion in onchain settlements across more than 125,000 holders. The tokenized IPO product is the framework's most visible expansion yet.
Payward said the first IPO offerings through Kraken and xStocks Alliance members are expected in the coming weeks. SpaceX was not named as the first issuer — Payward's announcement was deliberately forward-looking, timed to the broader IPO season that also includes Anthropic and OpenAI as widely discussed candidates. But the announcement on the same day SpaceX set its price was not coincidental: the company is positioning the product for exactly the kind of high-demand debut where retail investors have historically been shut out.
Why the timing matters
For crypto markets, the SpaceX IPO carries two distinct signals. The first is simply size: a $75 billion raise is large enough to move capital allocation decisions across institutional portfolios, and some analysts have argued that the AI trade and high-profile equity offerings are drawing capital away from bitcoin. K33 Research noted earlier this week that the growing "opportunity cost" of holding BTC amid AI-related assets' outperformance was contributing to the rotation. SpaceX's public debut adds one more high-yield alternative to the menu.
The second signal is the balance sheet itself. Corporate bitcoin treasury strategies became a serious institutional conversation after Strategy demonstrated that BTC could be held at scale. SpaceX going public with 18,712 BTC sets a precedent: public market investors will now price, discount, or hedge a nine-figure BTC position as part of a mainstream equity offering. How analysts and allocators treat that position — whether they apply a crypto-specific discount, model it as a commodity holding, or ignore it — will produce a data point that didn't exist before.
Kraken's tokenized IPO product, meanwhile, tests whether crypto-native retail demand can translate into real IPO allocations at institutional prices. The xStocks model has the volume history to be taken seriously. Whether it can move fast enough to capture the SpaceX listing, or whether it arrives for a later wave of offerings, is the open question. Payward was explicit: "coming weeks," not days.
Primary sources: Reuters via Yahoo Finance (June 3, 2026), CoinDesk live markets blog (June 3, 2026, 1:02 PM ET), CoinDesk business desk (June 3, 2026, 1:02 PM ET).