30 phút sụp đổ 45%, SpaceX chưa niêm yết nhưng nhà đầu tư nhỏ lẻ đã hứng chịu cú đấm

Original author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On the evening of May 28, the SPACEX-USDH perpetual contract on Hyperliquid experienced a severe flash crash, with the price dropping 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 liquidation volume reaching $1.51 million.

Data shows that the total trading volume of this contract in 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 punched through the liquidity, triggering a cascade of selling. The liquidated users were mainly retail investors, with a median margin of only about $31, commonly using around 3x leverage.

Ventuals, the perpetual contract platform within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, responded in a post after the incident, stating that the team had noticed the flash crash event in the SPACEX market. The cause was that one of the off-chain data providers, a component of the oracle price, returned incorrect data, leading to severe volatility in the oracle price and mark price of this market, which subsequently triggered the forced liquidation of some user positions.

The team has now taken measures to prevent similar incidents from recurring. Additionally, the team is assessing the impact of this event 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, allowing users to bet on changes in SpaceX's market valuation before its IPO. However, it does not represent actual stock nor confer any shareholder rights.

On Ventuals, 1 SPACEX represents a $1 billion valuation for SpaceX. If the SPACEX price is $420.69, it implies the market values SpaceX at $420.69 billion.

The core challenge for this type of contract is: how do you price a company that isn't publicly traded?

Ventuals' solution breaks down the pricing into two parts. One-third of the weight comes from Notice, an off-chain private market data provider, whose pricing model incorporates financing rounds, 409A valuations, mutual fund marks, secondary market trades and quotes, and comparable public companies.

Two-thirds of the weight comes from the exponentially weighted moving average 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, but it has a critical single point of failure. If the data returned by Notice itself is erroneous, that one-third external anchor becomes a force pulling the price in the wrong direction. The other two-thirds on-chain average price could hedge against this error under sufficient liquidity, but on the SPACEX contract with a daily volume of only $4.87 million, the on-chain price itself is very fragile. Combining two fragile components results in a price flash crash.

Low Liquidity Under No Arbitrage and Fragmentation

The SPACEX flash crash exposes not just Ventuals' problem but a broader issue. The entire category of pre-IPO synthetic products faces the same dilemma in pricing mechanisms: there is no unified spot market and no cross-platform arbitrage channel.

In traditional finance, price differences for the same stock between the NYSE and Nasdaq are almost non-existent because high-frequency market makers arbitrage in milliseconds. However, in the market for pre-IPO synthetic products, this arbitrage is structurally impossible. This is because each platform's contracts are assets or derivatives issued based on 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 closed pricing pond, with liquidity fragmented across multiple disconnected venues, making each pond much shallower than the whole.

Ventuals' SPACEX has a daily volume of $4.87 million. If the liquidity of existing platforms were concentrated in one place, the depth would be entirely different. But fragmentation exposes each platform to the risk of low liquidity.

The essence of pre-IPO synthetic products is a group of people betting on a number without a public price benchmark. Price discovery on each platform only reflects the consensus of that 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, characterized by low update frequency, narrow coverage, and opacity. No one truly knows how much SpaceX is worth. The valuation distribution for SpaceX's IPO on Polymarket is similarly dispersed: the probability for the range exceeding $2.4 trillion is 45%, while the probability for the range exceeding $2.6 trillion is 31%.

The Answer is About to be Revealed

SpaceX submitted a confidential S-1 filing to the SEC on April 1, targeting pricing on Nasdaq on June 11 and trading to begin on June 12, with a valuation range of $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion.

Ventuals' documentation explains the contract's settlement mechanism: after the IPO opens on the first day, the funding rate resets to zero, the oracle price is locked to the mark price, and a valuation based on the real-time stock price is introduced as an external price constraint. After the market closes, the mark price is overwritten with a valuation based on the closing price, and all open positions are forcibly settled at this price.

This means that on IPO day, all holders of SPACEX contracts will be settled based on the actual stock price. If there is a large gap between the on-chain price and the Nasdaq price, the settlement moment will result in a massive one-sided liquidation wave.

Analysts estimate the current gap is around 60%, and the convergence will likely not be smooth. Since there is no way to hedge on-chain positions with actual SpaceX stock before the IPO, the arbitrage mechanism is structurally broken. Convergence will probably occur violently within the last 72 hours.

This flash crash originated from an oracle data error, while the convergence on the June IPO day will stem from the calibration to the real price. The scope of the impact will depend on the total open interest across multiple platforms at that time. The closer SpaceX gets to its IPO, the more speculative funds will flow in, and fragmented liquidity and distorted pricing will expand simultaneously.

The user demographic with a median margin of $31 will not disappear. They will return, accompanied by more of that $31 margin.

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