Author: Nancy, PANews

While crypto enthusiasts were sharing their SpaceX subscription orders and excitement on social media, Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid was embroiled in controversy over its pricing rules for pre-market perpetual contracts on SPCX, becoming the focus of market debate.

Following the SPCX pricing controversy, Trade.xyz faces a test of trust.

On June 10, Trade.xyz issued a statement in response to the recent controversy surrounding the pricing of SPCX pre-market perpetual contracts.

According to the statement, Trade.xyz's IPOP contract is a price-based perpetual contract. Its core objective is to track market expectations for the price of a single Class A common share, rather than reflecting the company's overall valuation. Therefore, information such as the company's total share capital and market capitalization is not part of the contract rules, oracle pricing logic, or future contract conversion mechanisms. In other words, the SPCX price on Trade.xyz is closer to an indicator reflecting market sentiment and trading expectations than a theoretical stock price calculated based on the company's fundamentals.

Trade.xyz also mentioned that early product documentation included tutorials demonstrating how users could derive a reasonable price per share by combining their assessment of company valuation and total share capital. While this content was intended to help users understand the product's mechanics, some users mistakenly believed the platform itself would price shares based on market capitalization or share capital. Therefore, these examples have now been removed from the official documentation.

The statement emphasizes that Trade.xyz will not use, publish, or rely on share counts or market capitalization as a pricing benchmark for SPCX or any other XYZ market.

The trigger for this controversy came from SpaceX's latest IPO prospectus, released a few days ago. The document shows that SpaceX's actual total share capital is 13.08 billion shares, about 10% higher than the 11.87 billion shares previously used by the market. This means that, assuming the company's overall valuation remains unchanged, the theoretical price per share for SpaceX needs to be adjusted downwards by about 10%.

Following the announcement, several centralized exchanges (CEXs) suspended trading of the relevant contracts and resumed trading after repricing based on the new equity data. Trade.xyz, however, maintained that its product logic did not rely on equity data and therefore did not adjust its pricing framework accordingly. This dual pricing system triggered a wave of cross-platform arbitrage and quickly put Trade.xyz in the spotlight.

Regarding how to address this discrepancy in the future, Trade.xyz stated that once SpaceX officially completes its IPO and sufficient external trading data is generated in the public market, SPCX will switch to a standard external oracle pricing mechanism. At that time, the contract price is expected to gradually converge to the actual trading price of SpaceX stock in the public market.

 Feedback from some community members

However, this clarification further fueled market controversy. Many users believe that Hyperliquid did not fully and clearly disclose the contract rules in the early stages of the product launch, and that the UI and official documentation contained misleading descriptions for a long time. The platform's hasty release of a clarification announcement and modification of documents only after the IPO was approaching and the controversy erupted is hardly convincing.

Greater dissatisfaction stemmed from the real financial losses suffered by users. Because the HIP-3 mechanism lacks the rebase capability of traditional exchanges, when the market repriced according to SpaceX's latest share capital, the SPCX contract price could only passively gap down. As a result, the value of long positions shrank by about 10% in a short period, forcing many users with high leverage to liquidate their positions or even face margin calls. This loss directly translated into profits for short sellers and arbitrageurs.

In the view of these users, the platform not only failed to express sufficient concern for the affected users, but also failed to offer any compensation or mitigation solutions. Instead, it responded with the excuse that "that's how the product works," which was very indifferent and irresponsible.

In a sense, this discussion surrounding the pricing power of SPCX also provides a reference case for the design and rule disclosure of more on-chain pre-IPO assets in the future .

The Rebase problem remains unsolved, and on-chain Pre-IPO projects face a major test.

For Perp DEX, the lack of rebase capability means that any pre-IPO asset that encounters common stock market behaviors such as stock splits, additional share issuances, or dividends could lead to an instant revaluation of the contract price, triggering a large-scale chain of liquidations and unfair losses, as well as undermining users' trust in the platform.

To understand the importance of Rebase, we first need to understand what Rebase is and why it has become a key part of the design of pre-IPO perpetual contracts.

In simple terms, Rebase is a value-neutral adjustment mechanism. The platform adjusts the contract price and the number of user positions proportionally, ensuring that the overall value of a trader's position remains essentially unchanged before and after the adjustment. This mechanism is necessary because during the pre-IPO stage, the company's actual total share capital is usually not publicly disclosed, and exchanges can only design the initial contract price and multiplier based on market estimates of the share capital. Once the company officially submits its S-1/S-1A filings and discloses its true share capital, if there is a difference between the actual figure and the estimate, Rebase is needed to calibrate the contract parameters. Otherwise, the contract price will gradually deviate from the true value per share, potentially creating cross-platform arbitrage opportunities and forcing one-sided position holders to passively bear losses.

However, compared to CEX, Perp DEX is more difficult to implement rebase .

Specifically, CEXs, relying on centralized databases and professional risk control teams, can quickly suspend trading after corporate actions (such as share issuance or stock splits), uniformly adjust all user positions, and then resume market trading. The entire process is completed by the exchange's back-end, ensuring a smooth and continuous notional value for user positions . However, even for large CEXs with mature trading systems and professional technical teams, this type of rebase operation, involving synchronized adjustments to positions across the entire market, remains a complex undertaking.

Moreover, Perp DEX's matching, clearing, and position status all run on smart contracts, making it impossible to directly modify data like a CEX. Achieving a similar rebase effect often requires additional monitoring logic, special hooks, or contract upgrades, which not only increases gas costs and system complexity but also expands the potential attack surface and introduces new security vulnerabilities .

In addition, Rebase may further amplify the liquidity fragmentation problem that already exists in decentralized markets. The same pre-IPO asset may exist on multiple DEXs at the same time. Each market has limited depth, and LPs (liquidity providers) may be less willing to invest funds due to the additional uncertainty brought by Rebase, ultimately leading to decreased liquidity, increased slippage, and a further deterioration of the trading experience.

Of course, rebase is not entirely impossible in a decentralized architecture. Some community users have pointed out that, for example, Aster has completed a rebase adjustment for similar assets. This means that the real challenge is not that DEXs are inherently incapable of supporting it, but whether the platform is willing to design additional mechanisms for this and bear the resulting development and maintenance costs .

In contrast, Trade.xyz, besides adhering to a more market-oriented pricing philosophy, relies on the HIP-3 architecture, which allows developers to independently deploy their own Perp markets. While this model inherits Hyperliquid's high-performance order book system, each market has completely independent contract specifications, oracle definitions, and parameter settings, lacking unified platform-level native Rebase support, thus making it difficult to easily achieve batch adjustments across all positions. However, some community members have revealed that Trade.xyz is researching solutions for potential future events such as stock splits.

From a longer-term perspective, the SPCX pricing issue reveals more than just a product design flaw; it highlights a real challenge that Perp DEX must confront as it explores RWA assets. As more pre-IPO assets are mapped onto the blockchain, whether on-chain pre-IPO perpetual contracts, serving as a pre-market simulation before public market price formation, can establish a sufficiently reliable price discovery mechanism, withstand the test of real company behavior and information disclosure, or degenerate into a speculative game detached from fundamentals, remains to be seen and will require time and market validation.