Something very interesting is happening in the coming months that will likely put significant pressure on crypto. SpaceX is planning a mega-cap IPO for June that could drain an absurd amount of liquidity from the market.

The numbers are impressive. We're talking about a $75 billion offering with a valuation of $1.75 trillion. If priced at this level, it will be 2.5 times higher than Saudi Aramco's previous record in 2019. It would be the largest IPO in history. And it's not just SpaceX. OpenAI is aiming for a listing in Q4 with a valuation close to $1 trillion, and Anthropic is planning to go public in October with over $60 billion. Together, these three companies could raise more than $240 billion from June until the end of the year.

Here’s the critical question: crypto operates in the same liquidity pool that funds tech and AI stocks. When you have three mega-capital events happening within a six-month window, you're basically competing for the same speculative money. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and major assets have been trading with increasing correlation to the Nasdaq and S&P 500 in recent cycles. When capital moves out of stocks into IPO allocations, part of that flow, which would have exited anyway, would boost higher-risk assets, including cryptocurrencies.

What’s most interesting is that SpaceX is reserving 30% of the offering for retail investors, approximately $22 billion. That’s three times the typical retail participation in an offering of this size. Essentially, money that could be flowing into memecoins, altcoins, or Bitcoin will be concentrated in trying to get into SpaceX.

But there’s a detail that changes the conversation: SpaceX already holds 8,285 BTC in custody at Coinbase Prime. This is the first IPO of a company with a significant Bitcoin position disclosed under the new accounting rules that came into effect at the end of 2024. That’s a different institutional signal.

The historical parallel is concerning, though. Coinbase went public on April 14, 2021, at the peak of the last cycle. Bitcoin hit its all-time high of approximately $64.8K on that same day and then dropped 50% in six weeks. Investors who interpreted Coinbase’s IPO as a sign that crypto was becoming mainstream spent the following six months watching traditional capital withdraw. The lesson is that institutional milestones often indicate tops rather than starting points because the capital chasing the milestone is the same capital that was supporting the asset before.

The testable signal moving forward is whether crypto holds during the roadshow in May and June or begins to decline as allocators free up space for SpaceX’s subscription. A Bitcoin rally extending through these presentations would suggest that the spot ETF proposals managed to decouple it from the broader risk liquidity pool. But if we start to see selling pressure, especially from retail reallocating into SpaceX, then the story changes.

The crypto market has five years since Coinbase to learn from the previous cycle. If it truly learned, we’ll see in the next six months. If not, well... we already know how it ends.