28,000 crypto wallets pledged $560M for SpaceX shares they didn’t get

Last week, tens of thousands of crypto wallets pledged over half a billion dollars worth of digital assets for SpaceX shares, and received none. Unfortunately, the industry’s tokenized stock failure was a repeat performance.

For nearly a decade, thousands of crypto promoters have insisted that blockchain technology will deliver tremendous value through tokenized trading of equities.

However, despite wholehearted attempts and financial support from the industry’s largest companies, trading volumes of tokenized stock remain well below a fraction of one percent of traditional stock trading volumes.

Indeed, last week, 27,689 wallets pledged $557 million worth of digital assets to participate in a tokenized version of the SpaceX IPO via Binance alone.

Across listings on various crypto exchanges, including Bybit and Bitget Wallet, all of those orders failed to deliver SpaceX shares.

For years, crypto pitched its technology as an obvious efficiency improvement over slow and expensive clearinghouses, not to mention the benefit of widenening the pool of liquidity to a global audience that struggles to open traditional brokerage accounts.

It just never worked. Again and again, promoters’ sales pitches failed to live up to the promise.

On June 12, the day SpaceX debuted on Nasdaq, Binance, Bybit, and Bitget Wallet all canceled their pre-IPO tokenized SpaceX campaigns.

By then, customers had committed more than $1 billion but got none of the shares they wanted.

Backed Finance’s xStocks, the tokenized-equity issuer acquired by crypto exchange Kraken, seemed to be a root of the problem. When xStocks could not source its underlying shares, crypto contracts around the world failed. In a representative apology, Bybit admitted, “Due to xStocks’ inability to deliver the underlying assets, no SpaceX allocations were received.”

Binance blamed similar circumstances beyond its control.

Crypto’s pattern of tokenized stock failures

The excuse, as always, was that the blockchains worked fine, if only the traditional finance plumbing would have just cooperated.

As early as December 2020, Do Kwon’s Mirror Protocol launched tokenized stocks, allowing traders to buy “mirrored” versions of Apple and Tesla stock with no brokerage account.

Although the value of mAssets had already vaporized alongside Kwon’s Terra LUNA implosion in May 2022, the SEC later described those mirrored assets (mAssets) as unregistered “security-based swaps.”

By 2023, commissioners belatedly sued Terraform Labs and Do Kwon for violating US securities laws.

In 2021, crypto pitched tokenized stocks again; and again they failed.

Binance launched tokenized Tesla, Coinbase, and MicroStrategy stocks through German broker CM-Equity. FTX, meanwhile, ran a near-identical offering through the same German broker.

Regulators objected within weeks, and both exchanges backpedaled quickly.

Binance pulled those tokenized offerings by July 16, with support ending that October. FTX’s stock tokens were also gone well before the Sam Bankman-Fried fraud collapsed in November 2022.

This year, Binance’s tokenized SpaceX campaign pulled in roughly $557 million in USDC from over 27,000 wallets, and delivered no shares.

It refunded users their pledges and promised an airdrop as a consolation prize. Bybit similarly refunded customers.

Despite years of marketing, crypto technologies still have not brought tokenized stocks to the masses.