Karla Barker 
Some online chatter hints that retail investors might be selling their bitcoin to buy shares in the upcoming SpaceX IPO. The Elon Musk-owned company is expected to be the biggest IPO ever, offering up to 30% of its record $75 billion offering directly to retail investors through platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab. That’s more than three times the usual slice set aside for individuals.
The roadshow opened Thursday and was already oversubscribed, with more orders than shares available, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX is offering shares at a $1.8 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, bitcoin fell roughly 16% over the same period, briefly dipping below $60,000 before recovering to around $61,000, per CoinDesk data.
Following the money trail
Stablecoins are the most direct way to track money leaving crypto for cash. When a trader cashes out bitcoin to fund a brokerage account, they typically convert into a dollar-pegged token like USDC or tether, then redeem it for dollars. This shows up in two ways: stablecoins pulled off exchanges and, later, a shrinking supply when issuers burn the redeemed tokens.
Neither of these readings showed anything unusual, based on data assessed by CoinDesk. Outflows for USDC and tether stayed within the range they’ve held since February, according to CryptoQuant data. The largest single days in recent months were $2.5 billion in USDC on May 22 and $3.6 billion in tether on May 20, both before the recent sell-off.
Heavy withdrawals but mixed signals
Bitcoin and ether did see heavy withdrawals on Friday. About 66,470 bitcoin and 2.49 million ether moved off exchanges, making it one of the biggest single-day totals of the year, per CryptoQuant data. An outflow means coins leaving an exchange for a private wallet, which is what a buyer does after taking delivery. Selling does the reverse: coins moving onto exchanges to be sold.
The week’s largest flows look more like withdrawal and dip-buying, not a scramble for cash. Still, on-chain data has a blind spot. It can’t see inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account, where someone can sell bitcoin for dollars without either ever touching a public blockchain.
Funds show real selling
The clearest sign of money leaving crypto came from the funds. Spot bitcoin ETFs, which hold bitcoin directly, bled for 13 straight sessions through June 3. That’s a record stretch worth about $4.4 billion, before a small $3 million inflow snapped the streak. Ether ETFs ran a longer 17-session streak that broke the same day. When investors pull money from these funds, the issuer sells the underlying coins, so those redemptions represent real selling.
Whether crypto holders funded their SpaceX allocations won’t be answerable until the brokerages publish their own numbers. Robinhood reports monthly trading metrics, with June’s crypto volumes due in mid-July. Coinbase breaks out retail activity in second-quarter results later in the month. SpaceX prices on June 11 and lists on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX the next day.