Backpack’s tokenized SpaceX share token has crossed 10,000 onchain holders on Solana, six days after listing alongside the company’s Nasdaq debut. The milestone widens the holder gap with rival xStocks’ SpaceX product and lands as Backpack chief executive Armani Ferrante stakes out a structural distinction from competing onchain SpaceX exposure.
Backpack’s tokenized SpaceX share token has crossed 10,000 onchain holders on Solana, six days after listing alongside the company’s Nasdaq debut. The milestone widens the holder gap with rival xStocks’ SpaceX product and lands as Backpack chief executive Armani Ferrante stakes out a structural distinction from competing onchain SpaceX exposure.
The 10,000-holder count for SPCX, the Backpack Securities-issued tokenized SpaceX share, was first surfaced Wednesday evening by Solana data trackers and approaches roughly double the 3,000-holder count reported for xStocks’ SPCXx as of mid-week. Cumulative onchain volume in SPCX surpassed $350 million since the token went live, according to liquidity partner Sunrise, after the token hit $108 million in a single trailing-24-hour window on Tuesday.
Solana SPL Token
SPCX is a Solana SPL token issued by Backpack Securities, the broker-dealer arm of crypto exchange Backpack. Each unit is backed one-for-one by a SpaceX share that Backpack Securities purchased and custodies in a U.S. broker-dealer account. Holders can redeem the token for the underlying share and transfer it into a traditional brokerage account via ACATS and DTCC rails, according to Backpack’s product description. Sunrise, a tokenization infrastructure provider built on Wormhole, routes the issuance and liquidity onto Solana.
SPCX is a tokenized security entitlement. That places it in a different regulatory and economic category from the SpaceX exposure currently trading on Hyperliquid as a USDC-settled perpetual derivative.
The Pitch Against xStocks
Ferrante used the milestone to argue that Backpack’s redemption path makes SPCX a different product from xStocks’ SPCXx, the Solana SpaceX token issued by Switzerland-based Backed Finance under its xStocks brand.
“The most important difference is the right the asset gives you,” Ferrante posted on X on Wednesday afternoon. “xstocks gives you a right to cash. Backpack gives you an actual right to redeem one to one to a security entitlement. They are fundamentally different because of that. One gives you cash and the other gives you a share.”
In a follow-up post, Ferrante traced the xStocks model to defunct exchange FTX.
“We know the xstock model very well. It’s a copy paste of the model created by FTX,” he wrote, referring to the Liechtenstein-issued tokenized stock product FTX listed in 2021 before its 2022 collapse. “We very intentionally didn’t go with that model out of Liechtenstein because it’s fundamentally incompatible with giving users the ability to take the tokens into their brokerage account.”
xStocks Structure
Backed Finance’s xStocks tokenizes more than 60 U.S. equities by holding the underlying shares with a custodian and issuing transferable claims onchain. The structure entitles holders to a cash payout equal to the share price on redemption, not delivery of the share itself. The xStocks SpaceX token launched on Solana on June 12, the same day as SPCX, and trades across Bybit, Kraken, Coinbase International and BitMEX alongside synthetic pre-IPO perpetuals on those venues.
For a holder who wants to move the position into a traditional brokerage account, SPCX redeems through ACATS, the standard U.S. brokerage transfer system, and lands the SpaceX share in a Schwab or Fidelity account. SPCXx redeems for dollars.
A Crowded Solana SpaceX Field
SPCX entered a four-way Solana competition on listing day. Ondo Finance issued SPCXon, a tokenized SpaceX share routed through the firm’s regulated tokenization layer. Kraken’s xStocks SPCXx launched the same morning. Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO perpetual on SpaceX had been trading since mid-May. Bitget Wattet, Bybit and Binance subsequently canceled their tokenized SpaceX allocation campaigns on June 12 after xStocks could not source enough shares to fill demand.
Backpack and Sunrise filled the resulting demand gap. By Tuesday, Backpack reported that SPCX represented roughly half of all tokenized-stock volume on Solana, with Jupiter naming SPCX the most traded SpaceX token across any chain. Sunrise has now moved more than $350 million in cumulative SPCX volume since launch, according to its Wednesday update, and the token sits at the center of Solana Foundation’s Frontier Traders campaign, an institutional-tier liquidity program with a $500 million 30-day volume threshold.
Regulatory Exposure
Tokenized exposure to private-company equity remains a regulatory grey zone. SpaceX is now public after its Nasdaq listing at $75 billion in proceeds, removing the private-company asterisk that hung over pre-IPO synthetic products like Hyperliquid’s. SPCX is therefore a tokenized representation of a registered public security, which puts it inside the scope of the innovation exemption framework the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing for tokenized NMS stock. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce clarified in May that the planned exemption would cover only digital representations of existing registered equities. Synthetic stock-exposure instruments fall outside its scope.
Backpack issues SPCX through a U.S. broker-dealer subsidiary, which positions the product closer to the SEC’s tokenized-securities track than products issued through offshore SPV structures. Anthropic separately warned in May about unauthorized tokenization of private-company shares, illustrating the issuer-side risks around products that lack an explicit relationship with the underlying company
