There’s some chatter online suggesting retail investors might be selling their crypto to get into the SpaceX IPO. Elon Musk’s company, which builds rockets, satellites, and works on AI, is offering up to 30% of its record $75 billion offering directly to individual investors through platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. That’s more than three times the typical slice set aside for retail buyers in such deals.
The IPO roadshow kicked off Thursday and was already oversubscribed, meaning more orders came in than shares available. Bloomberg reported this. Shares are being offered at a valuation of about $1.8 trillion. Over the same period, bitcoin dropped roughly 16%, briefly falling below $60,000 before recovering to around $61,000, according to CoinDesk data.
Tracking crypto outflows
Stablecoins are probably the clearest way to track money leaving crypto for traditional dollars. If someone cashes out bitcoin to fund a brokerage account, they typically convert into a dollar-pegged token like USDC or Tether, then redeem it for cash. That shows up in two ways: stablecoins being pulled off exchanges, and later, a shrinking supply when issuers burn redeemed tokens.
Neither of these readings showed any major anomalies, according to CoinDesk’s assessment of CryptoQuant data. Outflows for USDC and Tether stayed within the range they’ve held since February. The largest single-day moves recently were $2.5 billion in USDC on May 22 and $3.6 billion in Tether on May 20, both of which happened before the recent sell-off.
Bitcoin and ether saw heavier withdrawals on Friday, with 66,470 bitcoin and about 2.49 million ether moving off exchanges. That ranked among the biggest single-day totals of the year, per CryptoQuant. An outflow means coins leave an exchange for a private wallet, which is what a buyer does after taking delivery. Selling does the reverse: coins move onto exchanges to be sold.
On-chain blind spots
On-chain data does have a limitation, though. It can’t see inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account, where someone can sell bitcoin for dollars without either transaction touching a public blockchain. So whether crypto holders have funded their IPO allocations won’t be clear until the brokerages share their own numbers. Robinhood reports monthly trading metrics, with June’s crypto volumes expected in mid-July. Coinbase breaks out retail activity in its second-quarter results later in the month.
The week’s largest crypto flows actually looked more like withdrawals and potential dip-buying, not a scramble for cash. The one place where money clearly did drain from crypto was the funds.
ETF outflows
Spot bitcoin ETFs, which hold bitcoin directly, bled for 13 straight sessions through June 3. That’s a record stretch worth about $4.4 billion, before a small $3 million inflow finally snapped the streak. Ether ETFs ran an even longer 17-session streak that broke the same day. When investors pull money from these funds, the issuer sells the underlying coins, so the redemptions represent real selling pressure.
SpaceX is set to price on June 11 and should list on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX the next day.
