A Tesla Cybertruck drives in front of the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, California, on April 13, 2026.
Ethan Swope | Bloomberg | Getty Images
cryptocurrency trader space x The pre-IPO perpetual futures market is anticipating a big opening day for Elon Musk’s much-touted space company.
A perpetual futures contract is currently trading at around $162 on the HyperLiquid trading platform, a market dominated by highly active, leverage-seeking crypto traders. This is about 20% above the fixed IPO price of $135 per share, but is well down from the peak level of over $220 reached shortly after its launch in May. Binance’s SpaceX perpetual futures were trading at similar levels.
Mr. Musk’s rocket company is reportedly operating at four times oversubscription, meaning demand from investors is roughly four times the number of shares available for sale.
SpaceX is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. A $1.77 trillion valuation would instantly make Musk’s venture the seventh-largest publicly traded company in the U.S., surpassing Tesla, which currently has a market capitalization of about $1.6 trillion.
“Hyperliquid’s permanent article suggests there is interest in a SpaceX IPO, but it is far from euphoric,” said Eric Chen, co-founder and CEO of decentralized financial infrastructure company Injective Labs. “These markets are dominated by highly active, risk-tolerant traders and are not pricing in a significant premium relative to other pre-IPO stocks. While this is a useful signal, it does not guarantee how the broader market will react once SpaceX actually goes public.”
The risk is that the most optimistic participants are still not extremely bullish, which raises questions about how long that demand will last once real liquidity and price discovery kick in, Chen said.
Perpetual futures contracts, known as “perps,” are a type of futures contract that allows investors to use leverage to speculate on the price of an asset without an expiry date, without owning the underlying asset.
According to CoinGecko, these are one of the most popular ways to trade cryptocurrencies, accounting for over 70% of all trading volume on centralized global crypto exchanges.
The decline in SpaceX’s P/E ratio is consistent with the general decline in crypto prices. Bitcoin and ether They fell by 20% and 23%, respectively, during the same period when PERP was launched on May 18th.
