27,689 Crypto Wallets Pledged $557M for SpaceX Shares and Got Nothing

Nearly 28,000 crypto wallets sent over half a billion dollars to buy tokenized SpaceX shares last week. None of them received any stock.

Binance collected $557 million in USDC from 27,689 participants. Bybit and Bitget Wallet ran similar campaigns. Collectively, customers committed more than $1 billion across the three platforms. When SpaceX listed on Nasdaq on June 12, every single campaign collapsed. Exchanges canceled the offerings. Pledges were refunded. Binance offered an airdrop instead. Bybit sent money back. Nobody walked away with equity.

The core problem, as Bybit and Binance explained, was a “share shortage.” The exchanges could not obtain the actual SpaceX shares needed to back the tokenized products. Backed Finance’s xStocks – the intermediary acquired by Kraken – was supposed to source those shares. It did not deliver. Bybit acknowledged xStocks’ inability to provide the assets. Binance cited “similar uncontrollable circumstances.” The outcome was the same: refunds, no stock.

The xStocks failure hit every platform that relied on that same infrastructure. Bybit, Binance, Bitget Wallet all depended on a single supply chain. When it broke, all of them were stuck holding roughly $1 billion in customer pledges with nothing to deliver. That is a structural vulnerability that the industry had not stress-tested, several traders tracking tokenized offerings said.

The pattern is not new. In 2020, Do Kwon’s Mirror Protocol tried to list tokenized Apple and Tesla shares. The SEC later labeled those products unregistered securities. Binance and FTX both ran tokenized stock programs around 2021, working through German broker CM-Equity and covering names like Tesla, Coinbase, and MicroStrategy. Regulatory pressure forced both to shut those offerings within months. Binance ended its tokenized stock support in October 2021. FTX’s programs were gone before the exchange collapsed in late 2022.

The SpaceX episode is the latest chapter in that repeating story. Exchanges commit significant money, hit a wall – regulatory or logistical – then retreat. Trading volumes for tokenized stocks have remained a tiny fraction of what moves through traditional equity markets. The gap between the pitch (any crypto wallet can access global stocks, no broker needed) and the actual delivery has never closed. It has widened.

The scale here was bigger. $557 million from Binance alone. More than $1 billion across three platforms. Those are not pilot numbers. Exchanges were betting the infrastructure had matured. It had not.

The sourcing mechanism is worth understanding. Tokenized stocks are not synthetic instruments that can be minted arbitrarily. They require real underlying shares. That means working with licensed intermediaries, clearing securities‑law hurdles, maintaining custody across jurisdictions. When xStocks hit a wall on share sourcing, there was no backup. The entire model depended on one provider.

Binance’s response – an airdrop as consolation – raised its own questions. No details on what the airdrop covers or how it compares to the pledged amounts. Participants are left to decide whether that is fair compensation or a token gesture.

For traders watching this space, the event reinforces a basic truth: the tokenized stock market remains a promise, not a product. Any exchange that offers tokenized equity without guaranteed access to the underlying shares is making a bet on the supply chain. The SpaceX case shows what happens when that bet fails.