SpaceX IPO: Are retail traders selling Bitcoin to chase the rocket?
Crypto traders are asking a fair question: are people dumping Bitcoin to buy into the SpaceX IPO? Bitcoin dropped about 16% during the SpaceX roadshow, slipped below $60,000 for a while, then clawed back to around $61,000. Awkward timing. I’ll be honest: timing alone is usually a bad witness. Still, a 16% move while a retail-heavy SpaceX sale is filling up is enough to make traders look for footprints.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and AI company, is trying to sell up to 30% of a $75 billion offering directly to retail investors through platforms such as Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. That 30% slice is the weird part. More than three times what individual investors usually get in an IPO. The roadshow opened Thursday and is already oversubscribed, with Bloomberg reporting more orders than available shares at a $1.8 trillion valuation. So where does the money come from? Maybe crypto. Maybe cash sitting in brokerage accounts. Maybe margin. The point is that “retail demand” is not one clean bucket.
For crypto traders, stablecoins are the first place to check. Most quick takes say Bitcoin selling should show up immediately on-chain. That is only half right. If someone sells Bitcoin to fund a brokerage account, they often pass through a dollar token such as $USDC or Tether before redeeming it for cash. In that version, stablecoins would likely leave exchanges first, then total supply would shrink later as issuers burned redeemed tokens. That trail should be visible. So far, it looks boring. CoinDesk’s read of the data shows $USDC and Tether outflows staying within the same range they have held since February. The biggest recent single days were $2.5 billion in $USDC on May 22 and $3.6 billion in Tether on May 20, both before the latest Bitcoin sell-off. My take: that does not look like a rush for the exits to fund SpaceX orders.
The Bitcoin and Ether flows are messier. On Friday, 66,470 Bitcoin and about 2.49 million Ether moved off exchanges. CryptoQuant data puts those among the biggest single-day totals of the year. But exchange outflows usually mean coins are leaving a trading venue for a private wallet. That fits better with buying and taking custody than selling for cash. Sellers usually move coins onto exchanges. Not away from them. Why does this matter? Because the week’s biggest flows look more like withdrawals after a dip than panic selling. Maybe buyers were moving coins off-platform for self-custody. Maybe some users were just cleaning up wallets after the volatility. Either way, it is not a clean “sell Bitcoin, buy SpaceX” trade.
There is one important blind spot, and it is a big one. On-chain data cannot see what happens inside Robinhood or Coinbase. A user can sell Bitcoin for dollars inside one of those accounts without anything moving on a public blockchain. So yes, some retail selling could be hidden inside brokerages. We just cannot see it yet. Counter to the usual advice, this is where the boring monthly reports matter more than the blockchain dashboards. Robinhood reports monthly trading metrics, with June crypto volume due in mid-July. Coinbase should show more retail detail in its second-quarter results later that month. Those numbers will matter more than the chatter.
The clearest crypto outflow is in the funds. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, which hold Bitcoin directly, saw 13 straight sessions of withdrawals through June 3. That was a record run worth about $4.4 billion before a tiny $3 million inflow ended it. Ether ETFs had a 17-session withdrawal streak that broke on the same day. ETF redemptions create real selling pressure because the issuer has to sell the underlying coins. Is that proof the money went into SpaceX? No. It only proves investors pulled money from regulated crypto products while a very large traditional IPO was grabbing attention. That distinction matters.
What this means
Right now, the data does not show retail traders broadly selling Bitcoin or other crypto to buy SpaceX shares. The stablecoin trail is quiet. The 66,470 Bitcoin and 2.49 million Ether exchange withdrawals look more like custody moves or dip-buying than liquidation. I would not turn that into a crypto victory lap, though. Yes, this cuts against the clean “nothing to see here” read. The ETF outflows are real, and $4.4 billion leaving spot Bitcoin ETFs is not background noise.
The next useful clues will come from Robinhood’s June trading metrics in mid-July and Coinbase’s second-quarter results later in the month. Those reports should show whether crypto selling happened inside brokerage accounts, where public blockchain data cannot see it. Bitcoin’s price around the SpaceX pricing on June 11 and the Nasdaq listing under SPCX the next day is also worth watching. If BTC loses $60,000 again, people will blame the IPO. They may even be partly right. For now, though, the evidence is thinner than the story.