Late-night price flash crash, retail investors hit across the board — what happened with SpaceX pre-market contracts?

📄Full Article· Automatically extracted by trafilaturaGemini 翻譯1949 words

Author: Jae, PANews On May 28, with less than a month to go before SpaceX's Nasdaq listing and market enthusiasm running high, its Pre-IPO assets staged successive "cliff-edge crashes" overnight: the preSPCX stock token price on Bitget plunged roughly 80% at one point; on the Perp DEX (decentralized perpetual contract exchange) Hyperliquid, the SpaceX perpetual contract flash-crashed 45% within 30 minutes, with over 400 retail traders liquidated and forced out. Before the bell has even rung for SpaceX's listing, the market has already written a cautionary footnote for Pre-IPO assets in advance. Bitget: 80% Plunge, the Truth Is a Token Split Yesterday, many traders glued to their screens gasped in shock. The preSPCX/USDT spot trading pair on Bitget instantly carved out a vertical 80% red candle. Such violent volatility was enough to make uninformed investors think the exchange was deliberately spiking the price to fleece retail traders. According to PANews's investigation, this "crash" was not in essence a sudden deterioration of the asset's fundamentals; the truth was a pre-announced token split. According to the official announcement released by Bitget, the platform suspended trading of the original Pre-IPO stock token preSPAX at 2:00 PM on May 28, and implemented a 1:5 split, with the underlying ticker updated to preSPCX after the split. A 1:5 split means investors' token holdings are multiplied by 5. With the total position value unchanged, the post-split unit price of the token is recalculated to one-fifth of the original, which manifests on the chart as a nominal price drop of 80%. At the trading price of around $900 at the time, the adjusted post-split price was approximately $180. Although this was purely a technical book-keeping adjustment, after trading reopened, because the K-line chart on the trading interface did not synchronously recalculate historical prices, the chart visually displayed a "crash." For retail investors lacking experience, emotionally sensitive, or facing information asymmetry, such visual shock may be misread as an "asset blow-up." Hyperliquid: 45% Flash Crash in 30 Minutes, Oracle Anomaly Triggers Domino Liquidations Compared to Bitget's "technical adjustment," the SPACEX perpetual contract flash crash on Hyperliquid was a real disaster caused by oracle errors, thin liquidity, and a leverage stampede. At 11 PM last night, the SPACEX-USDH contract on the HIP-3 Ventuals market saw its price free-fall from $2,277 to a low of $1,254 in just 7 minutes, a drop of 45%—nearly cut in half. Although the price quickly recovered to around $2,200 within the following 10 minutes, position cleansing had already been completed, and longs suffered heavy losses. As a result, 1,393 positions belonging to 405 users were forcibly liquidated, with cumulative notional losses of approximately $1.51 million. The median margin of the liquidated positions was only $31, indicating that market participants were predominantly retail traders. This flash crash stemmed from abnormal liquidations caused by oracle price-feed errors. According to a response from Ventuals, the Hyperliquid ecosystem perpetual contract platform, the cause of the incident was that the off-chain data provider used by the oracle component returned erroneous data, causing the market oracle price and mark price to fluctuate violently, which in turn triggered forced liquidation of some users' positions. Emergency measures have been taken, and the development team is assessing the impact of the incident on users. Ventuals subsequently further updated that affected users will receive compensation within the next 48 hours. At the same time, a deeper cause of this crash lies in the fact that Pre-IPO assets generally suffer from insufficient order book depth and fragile market liquidity, which, layered with the chain-reaction collapse of retail leverage, further amplified the market stampede effect and accelerated the spread of the decline. This was a rather "shallow" order book, like a puddle that doesn't even cover the ankles—a slightly larger stone tossed in is enough to splash up a poolful of waves. In a market with open interest of less than $3 million and 24-hour trading volume of only just over $4 million, a sell order on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars is enough to instantly sweep away large swathes of bids; as the price probes lower, longs hit liquidation lines, market-order dumps follow, and deeper price supports get blown through; late-night liquidity dries up, triggering a domino effect. In less than 20 minutes, a leverage game turned into a forced exit for retail traders. Conclusion It is undeniable that Pre-IPO assets are one of the most imaginative innovation directions in the crypto industry: allowing ordinary people, outside the high walls of the private equity market, to touch in advance the value mapping of top-tier unicorns. In a sense, this not only expands the boundaries of market participation but also provides a new price discovery mechanism for non-public assets. However, before real assets are officially listed on public markets and trading depth is sufficiently cultivated, such assets are destined to be accompanied by characteristics of high volatility, high speculation, and price distortion. Due to the lack of unified valuation benchmarks, mature arbitrage mechanisms, and sufficient market depth, their prices are often more susceptible to amplification by sentiment, liquidity, and leveraged capital. This violent volatility of the SpaceX synthetic asset once again exposes the fragility of Pre-IPO products in the market. As more popular unicorns are brought on-chain in the future and more speculative capital continues to pour in, whether the Pre-IPO sector can establish a more mature pricing mechanism, liquidity system, and risk control framework in the future will remain an issue the industry needs to continuously confront. (The above content is excerpted and reprinted with authorization from partner PANews, original link)

Data Status✓ Full text extractedRead Original (區塊客)

🔍Historical Similar Events· Keyword + Asset Matching6 items

2026-05-31

Denmark's pension fund blacklists SpaceX, slams Musk's "disastrous governance" and inflated $1.8 trillion valuation

Similarity 120%關鍵字 spacex同分類 zh

2026-05-29

Danish multi-billion pension fund places Musk's SpaceX on investment blacklist: $1.8 trillion valuation severely inflated, governance extremely poor

Similarity 120%關鍵字 spacex同分類 zh

2026-05-29

Are SpaceX and Tesla about to merge? If realized, the combined entity would hold 30,000 Bitcoin, vaulting it to the world's 5th largest Bitcoin-holding company

Similarity 120%關鍵字 spacex同分類 zh

2026-05-27