Crypto Exchanges Close the Gap to Wall Street as MEXC Logs 7.1 Billion in SpaceX Futures

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.

SpaceX Becomes the Test Case for the Full Equity Stack

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.

"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.

"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.