30분 만에 45% 급락, 상장도 안 한 SpaceX에 개미들이 한 방 먹었다
- 핵심 의견: 5월 28일, Hyperliquid의 SPACEX 무기한 계약이 오라클 데이터 오류로 인해 45% 급락하는 플래시 크래시를 겪었다. 이는 사전 상장(pre-IPO) 합성 상품이 현물 시장과 차익 거래 메커니즘 부재 상황에서 겪는 유동성 취약성과 가격 왜곡 리스크를 드러냈으며, SpaceX IPO가 임박함에 따라 이러한 리스크가 집중적으로 폭발할 가능성이 있음을 시사한다.
- 핵심 요소:
- 5월 28일, SPACEX-USDH 계약 가격이 30분 만에 2277달러에서 최저 1254달러로 45% 급락했다. 총 405명의 사용자, 1393개 포지션이 청산되었고, 청산 금액은 151만 달러에 달했다.
- 사건의 직접적인 원인은 오라클 구성 요소 중 하나(오프체인 데이터 제공업체 Notice)가 잘못된 데이터를 반환하여 마크 가격이 급격히 변동하고 강제 청산이 촉발된 것이며, 플랫폼 Ventuals는 피해 사용자에게 보상하겠다고 약속했다.
- 해당 계약의 가격 결정 메커니즘은 1/3 가중치는 오프체인 비공개 시장 데이터(Notice)에, 2/3 가중치는 체인상 지난 2시간 마크 가격 평균에 의존한다. 일일 거래량은 487만 달러에 불과해 시장 깊이가 매우 낮다.
- 사전 상장 합성 상품은 구조적 결함을 지닌다. 통일된 현물 시장이 없고, 교차 플랫폼 차익 거래 메커니즘은 구조적으로 불가능하며, 유동성이 여러 개의 폐쇄된 작은 웅덩이로 조각나 각 플랫폼이 낮은 유동성 리스크에 노출된다.
- SpaceX는 기밀 S-1 서류를 제출했으며, 6월 11일~12일 나스닥 상장을 목표로 한다. 기업가치 범위는 1.75조~2조 달러로 추정된다. 상장 당일 실제 주가로 강제 결제되며, 현재 체인상 가격과 나스닥 호가 간 격차는 약 60%로 추정된다.
Original Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
On the evening of May 28, the SPACEX-USDH perpetual contract on Hyperliquid experienced a severe flash crash. The price plummeted from $2,277 to a low of $1,254 within 30 minutes, a decline of nearly 45%, before rebounding to approximately $2,169.
This crash led to the liquidation of 405 users and 1,393 positions, with total liquidations amounting to $1.51 million.
Data shows that the total trading volume of this contract over the past 24 hours was only about $4.87 million, with open interest below $2.9 million, indicating extremely low market depth. A single large sell order nearly pierced through the liquidity, triggering a cascade of sell-offs. The liquidated users were primarily retail investors, with a median collateral of only about $31, and commonly using approximately 3x leverage.
Ventuals, the perpetual contract platform within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, responded in a post after the incident. The team noted the flash crash in the SPACEX market. The cause was an off-chain data provider, one of the components of the oracle price, returning erroneous data. This led to extreme volatility in the oracle price and mark price for that market, consequently triggering the forced liquidation of some user positions.
The team has since taken measures to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Additionally, they are assessing the impact of this incident on affected users to formulate an appropriate compensation plan. Affected users will receive compensation within the next 48 hours.
A Fragile Pricing Chain
SPACEX-USDH is a crypto perpetual contract launched by Hyperliquid that allows users to bet on changes in SpaceX's pre-IPO market valuation. It does not represent actual stock nor confer any shareholder rights.
On Ventuals, 1 SPACEX represents a $1 billion valuation of SpaceX. If the SPACEX price is $420.69, it implies the market values SpaceX at $420.69 billion.
The core challenge of such contracts is: how to price a company that is not publicly traded?
Ventuals' solution is to split the pricing into two parts. One-third of the weight comes from Notice, an off-chain private market data provider. Its pricing model incorporates funding rounds, 409A valuations, mutual fund mark-to-market, secondary market trades and quotes, and comparable public companies.
Two-thirds of the weight comes from the exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) of the contract's own mark price over the past 2 hours. Notice data is polled at least once per minute, and the oracle price is updated every 3 seconds.
This design ideally balances external information with on-chain price discovery. However, it has a critical single point of failure. If the data returned by Notice itself is erroneous, the one-third external anchor becomes a force pulling the price in the wrong direction.
The other two-thirds, the on-chain average price, could hedge against this error in times of ample liquidity. However, on a SPACEX contract with a daily trading volume of only $4.87 million, the on-chain price itself is fragile. Combining two fragile components results in a price flash crash.
Low Liquidity from Zero Arbitrage and Fragmentation
The SPACEX flash crash highlights not just Ventuals' problem but a dilemma faced by the entire category of pre-IPO synthetic products regarding pricing mechanisms: there is no unified spot market and no cross-platform arbitrage channel.
In traditional finance, spreads for the same stock on NYSE and Nasdaq are virtually non-existent because high-frequency market makers arbitrage in milliseconds. However, in the market for pre-IPO synthetic products, such arbitrage is structurally impossible. This is because the contract on each platform is an asset or derivative issued according to its own rules and cannot be hedged across platforms.
SPACEX on Hyperliquid and SPCX on Binance track the same company, but there is no mechanism to ensure price consistency between them. The result is that each platform forms its own isolated pricing pond. Liquidity is fragmented across multiple non-interconnected venues, making each pond much shallower than the whole.
Ventuals' SPACEX has a daily trading volume of $4.87 million. If the liquidity of the existing platforms were concentrated in one place, the depth would be completely different. But fragmentation exposes each platform to the risk of low liquidity.
The essence of pre-IPO synthetic products is that a group of people bets on a number without a public price benchmark. The price discovery on each platform only reflects the consensus of the small group of traders on that platform, with no rigid connection to the company's actual valuation.
Data sources like Notice are private market information with low update frequency, narrow coverage, and lack of transparency. No one truly knows how much SpaceX is worth. On Polymarket, the valuation distribution for SpaceX's IPO is similarly dispersed, with a 45% probability for the range above $2.4 trillion and a 31% probability for the range above $2.6 trillion.
The Answer is Imminent
SpaceX submitted a confidential S-1 filing to the SEC on April 1, targeting a Nasdaq pricing on June 11, with trading commencing on June 12, within a valuation range of $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion.
Ventuals' documentation outlines the contract's settlement mechanism. After the IPO's first-day opening, the funding rate resets to zero, the oracle price is locked to the mark price, and simultaneously, a valuation based on the real-time stock price is introduced as an external price constraint. After the market close, the mark price is overwritten by the valuation based on the closing price, and all open positions are forcibly settled at this price.
This means that on the IPO day, all holders of SPACEX contracts will be settled according to the real stock price. If a significant gap exists between the on-chain price and the Nasdaq pricing, the settlement moment will result in a massive, one-sided liquidation wave.
Analysts estimate this gap is currently around 60%. The convergence is unlikely to be smooth because, before the IPO, there is no way to hedge on-chain positions using actual SpaceX stock; the arbitrage mechanism is structurally broken. Convergence will likely occur violently in the final 72 hours.
This flash crash originated from an oracle data error. The convergence on the IPO day in June will stem from the calibration of the real price. The extent of its impact will depend on the total open interest across multiple platforms at that time. The closer SpaceX gets to its IPO, the more speculative capital will flow in, causing fragmented liquidity and distorted pricing to swell in tandem.
The user base with a median collateral of $31 will not disappear. They will return, bringing more $31 collaterals with them.
