Are retail traders selling bitcoin to buy Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO?

Exchange flows and stablecoin movements through this week's sell-off show no wall of money leaving crypto for cash. Exchanges such as Robinhood and Coinbase will not publicly reporting their figures until July.

Some online chatter seems to speculate that retail investors may be selling crypto to chase the biggest IPO ever.

The Elon Musk-owned rockets, satellite and AI company SpaceX is selling up to 30% of its record $75 billion offering straight to retail investors through Robinhood, Fidelity and Charles Schwab, more than three times the slice a typical IPO sets aside for individuals.

The roadshow opened Thursday already oversubscribed, with more orders than shares on offer, Bloomberg reported. It is offering shares at a $1.8 trillion valuation.

Bitcoin fell roughly 16% over the same timespan and briefly traded below $60,000 before recovering to around $61,000, according to CoinDesk data.

Stablecoins are the most direct way to track money leaving crypto for dollars. A trader cashing out bitcoin to fund a brokerage account converts into a dollar-pegged token like USDC or tether, then redeems it for cash. That shows up two ways, as stablecoins pulled off exchanges and, later, as a shrinking supply when issuers burn the redeemed tokens.

Neither moved of these readings show anomalies, per data assessed by CoinDesk Outflows for USDC and tether stayed inside 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 came before the sell-off.

Bitcoin and ether did see heavy withdrawals on Friday, 66,470 bitcoin and about 2.49 million ether moving off exchanges, among the biggest single-day totals of the year on CryptoQuant's data.

An outflow is 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.

On-chain data has a blind spot, however. It can't see inside a Robinhood or Coinbase account, where someone can sell bitcoin for dollars without either ever touching a public blockchain.

Whether crypto holders funded their 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, and Coinbase breaks out retail activity in second-quarter results later in the month.

Bitcoin and ether did see heavy withdrawals on Friday, 66,470 bitcoin and about 2.49 million ether moving off exchanges, among the biggest single-day totals of the year on CryptoQuant's data.

An outflow is 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 like withdrawal and dip-buying, not a scramble for cash.

The one place money clearly drained from crypto was the funds.

Spot bitcoin ETFs, the exchange-traded products that hold bitcoin directly, bled for 13 straight sessions through June 3, 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 the redemptions are real selling.

SpaceX prices on June 11 and lists on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX the next day.