A historic stock market debut is imminent, and its impact on the crypto market is a subject of interest. SpaceX has filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, aiming to raise $75 billion at a valuation of $1.75 trillion.
If successful, this IPO will be the largest in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29 billion record in 2019. The listing is expected to take place in June, with Polymarket traders assigning a 65% probability to this timeline and a 53% probability that the first-day closing market cap will exceed $2 trillion. SpaceX is not alone in its pursuit of a public listing, as OpenAI and Anthropic are also planning to go public, potentially raising over $60 billion and $1 trillion, respectively. The combined capital raised by these three companies is expected to exceed $240 billion, a figure that surpasses every venture-backed US IPO since 2000, according to PitchBook estimates.
This massive influx of capital has the potential to disrupt the crypto market, as it may drain liquidity and impact bitcoin's price. Crypto assets, including bitcoin and ether, have traded in correlation with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 over the past two cycles, and the rotation of speculative capital from equities to IPOs may lead to a compression of liquidity in the crypto market.
The historical parallel with Coinbase's listing in April 2021 is a point of concern, as it marked the peak of the last bitcoin cycle, followed by a 50% drawdown. The lesson learned from this experience is that institutional milestones often mark the top of a cycle rather than the starting point, as the capital that chases these milestones is the same capital that previously supported the asset.
SpaceX's IPO has two features that connect directly to crypto flows: the 30% retail allocation, which is three times the typical retail share, and the company's holding of 8,285 BTC, worth approximately $600 million. The testable signal going forward is whether crypto will hold up through the roadshow window in May and June or begin to drift lower as allocators free up room for the SpaceX subscription. A bitcoin rally that extends through the roadshow period may suggest that the spot-ETF bid has decoupled crypto from broader risk-on flows.