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🐳 Daily Edition: Hyperliquid soars as 24/7 Pre-IPO markets gain traction

🐳 Daily Edition: Hyperliquid soars as 24/7 Pre-IPO markets gain traction

The new SPCX perpetual from Trade.xyz implies a >$2T valuation as price discovery for the biggest IPO in history happens onchain

Beluga & Will McKinnon
May 18, 2026

With BTC under $77k and ETH under $2,200, most of the crypto market is bleeding off the back of Iran-tied risk-off flows… that is except for CT darling HYPE, the native token of perps DEX king and Layer 1 network Hyperliquid. HYPE is now up over 10% today to $48, its highest point since before the market crash in October.

24 Hour Heatmap, Source: CoinMarketCap

A lot of the credit for the recent rise goes to Trade.xyz, which has now launched several pre-IPO and tokenized equity perpetuals. The latest in these is SPCX-USDC, a synthetic perpetual representing (importantly, not actual shares) SpaceX equity. Within hours of today’s launch the price had ripped to an implied valuation over $2.5T, well over the reportedly-targeted IPO valuation of $1.75-2T.

As I’ve often said, despite all the research papers into obscure niches of blockchain cryptography, the thing we still do best as an industry is trade things. Making illiquid assets in high demand liquid for the public to engage with, like private shares in exciting companies, commodity markets with no weekend trading or even real estate could end up being what finally bridges the gap between TradFi and crypto.

The Trade.xyz/Hyperliquid solution certainly isn’t perfect, but they’ve created a real movement and I’m excited to see how the vertical further develops. As synthetic perps aren’t actually shares, they can avoid repercussions like the Anthropic news from last week while still allowing price discovery to occur. We can’t expect perfect accuracy until those markets are generating more volume, but if the Cerebras IPO is any indicator, we may just see SPCX IPO over $2T.