Crypto
exchange MEXC said today (Tuesday) that perpetual futures tied to SpaceX shares
drew more than 7.1 billion USDT in trading volume in the weeks after the rocket
company listed on June 12. The figure comes from the exchange’s own
second-quarter report and has not been independently audited.
Users could
subscribe to SpaceX before it went public, trade futures on it afterward, hold
a tokenized version, and buy the actual share, without ever leaving the
platform.
MEXC ran
two SPACEX(PRE) subscription rounds while the company was still private,
collecting over 173 million USDT from more than 74,000 entries, the report
said.
One name
went from private to publicly traded inside a single quarter, and MEXC sold a
product at every stage of the journey.
RealStocks,
which went live June 1, supplied the last piece. The service routes orders for actual
US shares and ETFs through a licensed securities broker partner, giving buyers dividends rather
than price exposure alone. The exchange has still not named the broker,
disclosed custody arrangements, or explained how the USDT-to-dollar conversion
is priced.
More than
120,000 users signed up in the first month and 52% of them funded an account,
according to the company. By June 18, it had settled dividends on 34 stocks and
ETFs.
Stock
futures carried much of the equity flow. Micron’s June earnings lifted MU
futures volume on the platform by roughly 142% in a single day, MEXC said, with
activity spilling into SanDisk, SK hynix and a DRAM ETF.
Vugar Usi Zade, MEXCs CEO
“Q2
put real numbers behind the word gateway,” said Vugar Usi, who took over
as chief executive during the quarter.
Binance, Kraken and
Coinbase Are Building the Same Thing
Binance
opened access to roughly 7,000 US stocks on June 1, the same day RealStocks launched. Orders are arranged through
broker-dealer Nest Trading, with Alpaca handling custody, dividends and
corporate actions, and fractional purchases start at $5, funded in USDC, USDT
or BNB.
Kraken went
the tokenized route instead. Its xStocks brand passed $25 billion
in cumulative transaction volume in under eight months, listed on Deutsche Börse’s 360X venue, and now
accounts for eight of the eleven largest tokenized equities. Coinbase has
described its own version of the plan as an “Everything Exchange”
covering crypto, stocks, derivatives and event contracts.
Prediction
markets are the other shared front. MEXC opened a zero-fee event
contract platform in March and added multi-outcome Combo positions on June 9. Average daily volume
there rose more than 6,700% between early and late June, the company said, off
a starting base it did not disclose.
Traffic Runs Both Ways as
Brokers Copy the Perpetual
The
borrowing is not one-directional. On Monday, Pepperstone said it would extend its
perpetual CFD range beyond SpaceX into metals, stock indices and energy, with gold, silver, Nasdaq, S&P
500, WTI and Brent versions listed as planned.
The perpetual, a contract with no expiry that uses periodic
funding payments to stay near the underlying, began life in crypto and is now
being fitted onto shares and commodities inside a regulated CFD wrapper.
Tamas Szabo, CEO at Pepperstone
“We
believe perpetual markets will become a standard feature of modern
finance,” Pepperstone group chief executive Tamas Szabo said. European
regulators have already told firms that perpetual futures fall under EU CFD
rules, which drags the format inside the same retail leverage caps that MEXC’s
offshore version sits outside.
The Refund the Report Does
Not Mention
MEXC’s
Launchpad section says SPACEX(PRE) traded 12% above its subscription price at
listing and reached a 38% peak return. It says nothing about refunds.
On June 12,
MEXC cancelled tokenized SpaceX
allocations and returned money to subscribers, along with Binance, Bybit and Bitget Wallet,
after xStocks failed to source the underlying shares. All four had been
reselling access to allocations that Kraken’s tokenization arm promised to
procure, and when that single supplier came up empty, so did everyone hanging
off it.
Demand was
never the constraint. Binance’s campaign drew more than $557 million in USDC
before it was pulled, and MEXC’s first round ran 15.5 times oversubscribed. The
shares just never showed up.
US Retail Stays Outside
the Perimeter
None of
this touches American investors. Tokenized equity products are closed
to US persons, and
Kraken’s SpaceX token also excluded users in the UK, Canada and Australia.
Europe is
narrowing as well. MEXC entered July without a MiCA
license and without
any public update on its application, and its published list of restricted
jurisdictions, last revised in May, does not include EU member states. Hong
Kong’s securities regulator put the exchange on its warning list
over unlicensed activity in 2024.
MEXC put
its June reserve ratio at 156.5% across major assets, with bitcoin backed at
269%, and said its futures insurance fund hit $753 million in July. Both
numbers are the exchange’s own, and neither has been verified by an outside
auditor.
Crypto
exchange MEXC said today (Tuesday) that perpetual futures tied to SpaceX shares
drew more than 7.1 billion USDT in trading volume in the weeks after the rocket
company listed on June 12. The figure comes from the exchange’s own
second-quarter report and has not been independently audited.
Users could
subscribe to SpaceX before it went public, trade futures on it afterward, hold
a tokenized version, and buy the actual share, without ever leaving the
platform.
MEXC ran
two SPACEX(PRE) subscription rounds while the company was still private,
collecting over 173 million USDT from more than 74,000 entries, the report
said.
One name
went from private to publicly traded inside a single quarter, and MEXC sold a
product at every stage of the journey.
RealStocks,
which went live June 1, supplied the last piece. The service routes orders for actual
US shares and ETFs through a licensed securities broker partner, giving buyers dividends rather
than price exposure alone. The exchange has still not named the broker,
disclosed custody arrangements, or explained how the USDT-to-dollar conversion
is priced.
More than
120,000 users signed up in the first month and 52% of them funded an account,
according to the company. By June 18, it had settled dividends on 34 stocks and
ETFs.
Stock
futures carried much of the equity flow. Micron’s June earnings lifted MU
futures volume on the platform by roughly 142% in a single day, MEXC said, with
activity spilling into SanDisk, SK hynix and a DRAM ETF.
Vugar Usi Zade, MEXCs CEO
“Q2
put real numbers behind the word gateway,” said Vugar Usi, who took over
as chief executive during the quarter.
Binance, Kraken and
Coinbase Are Building the Same Thing
Binance
opened access to roughly 7,000 US stocks on June 1, the same day RealStocks launched. Orders are arranged through
broker-dealer Nest Trading, with Alpaca handling custody, dividends and
corporate actions, and fractional purchases start at $5, funded in USDC, USDT
or BNB.
Kraken went
the tokenized route instead. Its xStocks brand passed $25 billion
in cumulative transaction volume in under eight months, listed on Deutsche Börse’s 360X venue, and now
accounts for eight of the eleven largest tokenized equities. Coinbase has
described its own version of the plan as an “Everything Exchange”
covering crypto, stocks, derivatives and event contracts.
Prediction
markets are the other shared front. MEXC opened a zero-fee event
contract platform in March and added multi-outcome Combo positions on June 9. Average daily volume
there rose more than 6,700% between early and late June, the company said, off
a starting base it did not disclose.
Traffic Runs Both Ways as
Brokers Copy the Perpetual
The
borrowing is not one-directional. On Monday, Pepperstone said it would extend its
perpetual CFD range beyond SpaceX into metals, stock indices and energy, with gold, silver, Nasdaq, S&P
500, WTI and Brent versions listed as planned.
The perpetual, a contract with no expiry that uses periodic
funding payments to stay near the underlying, began life in crypto and is now
being fitted onto shares and commodities inside a regulated CFD wrapper.
Tamas Szabo, CEO at Pepperstone
“We
believe perpetual markets will become a standard feature of modern
finance,” Pepperstone group chief executive Tamas Szabo said. European
regulators have already told firms that perpetual futures fall under EU CFD
rules, which drags the format inside the same retail leverage caps that MEXC’s
offshore version sits outside.
The Refund the Report Does
Not Mention
MEXC’s
Launchpad section says SPACEX(PRE) traded 12% above its subscription price at
listing and reached a 38% peak return. It says nothing about refunds.
On June 12,
MEXC cancelled tokenized SpaceX
allocations and returned money to subscribers, along with Binance, Bybit and Bitget Wallet,
after xStocks failed to source the underlying shares. All four had been
reselling access to allocations that Kraken’s tokenization arm promised to
procure, and when that single supplier came up empty, so did everyone hanging
off it.
Demand was
never the constraint. Binance’s campaign drew more than $557 million in USDC
before it was pulled, and MEXC’s first round ran 15.5 times oversubscribed. The
shares just never showed up.
US Retail Stays Outside
the Perimeter
None of
this touches American investors. Tokenized equity products are closed
to US persons, and
Kraken’s SpaceX token also excluded users in the UK, Canada and Australia.
Europe is
narrowing as well. MEXC entered July without a MiCA
license and without
any public update on its application, and its published list of restricted
jurisdictions, last revised in May, does not include EU member states. Hong
Kong’s securities regulator put the exchange on its warning list
over unlicensed activity in 2024.
MEXC put
its June reserve ratio at 156.5% across major assets, with bitcoin backed at
269%, and said its futures insurance fund hit $753 million in July. Both
numbers are the exchange’s own, and neither has been verified by an outside
auditor.
