Cannes. June 30, 2025.

The Hotel Martinez. White stone, palm trees, the Mediterranean catching the late-morning light. The kind of place where men in linen suits drink Aperol at eleven in the morning and call it research.

Vlad Tenev steps to the microphone. He tells everyone that Europeans can now buy SpaceX. And OpenAI. Two private companies that have spent a decade behind a velvet rope guarded by Goldman Sachs.

A few clap. A few cheer. The bartender keeps polishing a glass.

A Frenchman in the third row—middle-aged, no tie, the easy posture of a man whose family has owned property since the franc—opens his phone.

Two taps. He owns €500 of SpaceX exposure. He doesn't look up. He goes back to his espresso.

In the same minute, somewhere in the suburbs of Cleveland, a woman opens her version of the Robinhood app. 

She has been reading about the SpaceX IPO for a year. She is exactly the kind of investor the Wall Street Journal has in mind when it talks about "retail demand."

She taps.

Not yet available in your region.

She tries again. Same message.

She closes the app. Pours a second cup of coffee. Considers, briefly, whether to move to France.

This is the world we live in now. 

A man in the South of France can buy a sliver of Elon Musk's rocket company before breakfast. 

An American—in the country that built the rocket company—cannot. The velvet rope has been moved. It used to keep regular people out of Wall Street. Now it pushes regular Americans out of America.

Meanwhile, retail is scrambling for a backdoor way into Musk’s space company before the big IPO.

Crypto, naturally, has built one. 

It’s called tokenization.

I spent three weeks figuring out whether SpaceX tokens are worth it.

Here’s What I Found

There are now five different ways to buy SpaceX without buying SpaceX. Five tokens. Five blockchains. 

The cheapest will cost you $10. The most expensive will cost you $500 just to walk in the door. 

Republic's rSPAX is the only one Americans can legally buy. Reg CF-compliant, $50 minimum, very tidy. It is also a 10-year debt note maturing in November 2035. If RepublicX LLC stumbles before SpaceX prints, the rSPAX holder graduates to creditor status in a Delaware bankruptcy proceeding. 

Jarsy's JSPAX actually holds SpaceX shares in Delaware SPVs—the cleanest plumbing in the bunch. The catch: most US investors aren't allowed near it, and total liquidity is about $670,000. A single even moderately enthusiastic seller moves the price.

Robinhood's Cannes tokens are MiFID II derivatives wrapped around an SPV. (Translation: a contract about a contract about some shares somebody else owns.) Tenev himself called them "not technically equity." OpenAI publicly disavowed them. The Bank of Lithuania has been thinking about it for ten months and has yet to think out loud.

Hyperliquid's vSPACE is a synthetic perpetual with up to 10x leverage. Built for crypto traders. Buyers should look elsewhere.

Bitget's preSPAX and BingX's VNTL ride the same Republic wrapper, with higher minimums and no Americans allowed.

In short? The wrapper is the trade. 

You aren't buying SpaceX. You're buying a Delaware LLC's promise about SpaceX. Or a Jersey SPV's. Or an indecisive Lithuanian broker's derivative. 

The token is the easy part. The legal entity behind it decides whether you ever see your money.

How I Really Feel 

I'm bullish on tokenization. Just not for this.

Tokenized equity is a genuine financial innovation. The technology layer is solved. But the legal layer is where the rot lives. 

Every tokenized SpaceX product is doing legal gymnastics to manufacture exposure to a company that hasn't authorized them. OpenAI showed how that breaks—one corporate statement, forty-eight hours, the economic basis of the product in question.

This gets fixed. But not before the IPO. 

The SEC's Innovation Exemption has been "weeks away" since December. The CLARITY Act is targeting July 4 for House passage. 

Tokenized private-company shares with full legal cover aren't a now product. They're late-2026 at the earliest.

As far as SpaceX backdoor plays go, the current tokenized products are at the bottom of the list. Wrapper risk. Counterparty risk. A retail premium that collapses on print day.

Tokenization is here to stay. But, alas, it hasn't finished moving in.