Coinbase’s New SpaceX Pre-IPO Bets: Get Rich Quick Or Cry Into Your Cabbage Soup

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If you’ve ever stared at a SpaceX rocket blasting off into the clouds and thought “I wish I could bet my entire pocket money on this thing before it either lands on the moon or crashes into a farmer’s turnip field”, you’re in luck, you greedy little scamp.

That crypto exchange your cousin won’t stop ranting about at family barbecues has gone and done the daft thing: they’ve launched pre-IPO perpetual futures for SpaceX, the very first product under their new “let’s regular people gamble on fancy private companies before they go public” vertical, running on their Coinbase International Exchange. The whole thing’s only open to folks outside the US, which is probably for the best – the SEC would have a fit so loud it’d blow the roof off their building and send all their paperwork flying into the Potomac.

The SPCX-PERP market opened just after 6AM UTC on Wednesday, June 4, and CEO Brian Armstrong popped up on X to gush that pre-IPO perps are “a great way to get exposure to private companies before they go public” and “to help with price discovery”. Translation for anyone who doesn’t speak corporate nonsense: “We’re letting you bet monopoly money on Elon’s rocket company before he makes it official, and if you lose all your savings, don’t come crying to us.”

This timing isn’t an accident, you know. SpaceX filed their SEC paperwork on June 1, saying they’re gonna sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a pop to raise a whopping $75 billion. At that price, the whole company’s worth $1.77 trillion – more money than the entire GDP of most small countries, and enough to buy every single chocolate bar in the world, if you’re partial to that sort of thing. They’ll list on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX as early as June 12, and Elon Musk will keep over 82% of the voting power, which means he still gets to yell at everyone if they mess with his rocket plans, even after all the rich city folks buy their shares.

Now, these contracts don’t work like normal stock bets. Instead of tracking a single share price, they follow a valuation-based index, calculated by taking the company’s total equity value and dividing it by one billion. So if the index is sitting at 1,770, that means SpaceX is worth $1.77 trillion, which is enough to build a rocket to Mars and still have change left over for a giant lollipop for every kid on Earth. The index is built from a mix of the one-hour exponential moving average of the Mark Price and an external valuation feed – if the two drift apart by more than 5%, the index just defaults to the average, which is probably for the best, because nobody wants a rocket bet that crashes because a spreadsheet had a tantrum.

All profit and loss is settled in USDC, which is crypto money, not the cold hard cash you can spend on actual sweets at the corner shop. There’s no expiry date, no physical shares handed over, and no ownership rights attached to the contract at all, besides the right to feel very smug or very stupid when the numbers go up or down. Once SpaceX completes its IPO and files its final 424B4 prospectus with the SEC, Coinbase will pause trading, cancel all open orders, and rebase the contract into a standard per-share equity perpetual future. The exchange says this conversion will be P&L-neutral for existing position holders, and a five-minute TWAP bridge will smooth the transition from the valuation index to the live equity price feed – or at least, that’s what they say, and we all know how those “we won’t mess up your money” promises usually go, don’t we?

You can bet up to 5 times your money on SPCX-PERP, which is lower than the 10x leverage offered on Coinbase’s existing stock perpetual futures, probably because even Coinbase knows that letting people bet 10x their rent money on a rocket company is a recipe for disaster that would make Veruca Salt’s golden egg incident look like a minor inconvenience. Position limits are tiered: up to $350,000 in notional value at 2x leverage, then $200,000 at 5x. There’s also a $60 million cap on total notional value across all positions held above default leverage, which is probably just enough to stop one very wealthy idiot from breaking the entire market.

Coinbase has waved a big red flag about the risks, of course. There’s no centralized spot market for SpaceX shares, liquidity is thinner than a chocolate bar left out in the summer sun, and valuations can jump around like a flea on a hot griddle if SpaceX gets a new funding round, releases a big announcement, or Elon tweets something daft about colonizing Jupiter next Tuesday. The exchange warns that a 25% or larger move on IPO open day is totally plausible, and at 3x to 5x leverage, that can trigger forced liquidations or auto-deleveraging events so fast you’ll blink and your entire savings will be gone. Even worse, the pre-IPO phase runs in cross-margin mode, meaning losses on the SpaceX contract can eat into the margin supporting other positions in your portfolio – so if you bet the farm on SpaceX and it crashes, you might lose your farm, your pet goldfish, and that half-eaten bag of crisps you stashed under your bed for later.

Coinbase isn’t the first to offer SpaceX pre-IPO exposure, of course. Back on May 18, Trade.xyz launched their own SPCX-USDC contract on Hyperliquid’s order book at a $150 reference price, which spiked to $216 in hours and recorded $33 million in 24-hour volume on its first day. Binance, OKX, and Crypto.com all have their own similar products too, because everybody wants a slice of the rocket gambling pie. But Coinbase’s positioning their product as the fancy, regulated option: it runs on their Bermuda-licensed International Exchange, uses their existing risk framework and liquidation waterfall, and will convert into a regulated equity perpetual future post-IPO instead of staying a weird synthetic instrument. Which is basically like saying your chocolate bar is better because it has a fancy gold wrapper, even if it still tastes like stale cardboard.

Coinbase says SpaceX is just the first listing in a planned pipeline of pre-IPO perpetual futures spanning technology, artificial intelligence, energy, and space sectors, though they didn’t name any specific companies, which is probably for the best – next thing you know they’ll be letting you bet on whether a new chocolate factory will open in your town or not. SpaceX’s roadshow begins today, June 4, and if the current timeline holds, pricing is expected on June 11, with Nasdaq trading starting June 12. So if you’re feeling very lucky, or very silly, you can go place your bets now, and hope you don’t end up eating nothing but cabbage soup for the next month when your bet goes wrong.

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2026-06-04 16:05