Everybody is looking to the skies.

From the Artemis II mission, to Blue Origin’s semi-successful rocket launch last week, to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and plans for a moon-based space station.

The commercialisation of space is finally underway.

SpaceX filed for an IPO this month, with a staggering $1.75 trillion target valuation.

And the mainstream media are all hooked on the same things:: Starlink as a money printer… the scale of Elon’s rockets… and how he’s going to help make humanity an interplanetary species.

Fair enough. Those are definitely headline grabbers. That’s the “sexy” story.

But I think we should set all of that aside for a moment.

I think there’s something bigger hiding inside the SpaceX IPO… something almost nobody is talking about…

Most of the market has already forgotten that buying a share of SpaceX when it lists isn’t just buying rockets and satellites.

You’re buying a backdoor listing of what might become the most valuable crypto platform on the planet.

Buy SpaceX and you’re also buying X

In February, Musk folded xAI into SpaceX in an all-stock deal. The combined post-merger value is $1.25 trillion. Just prior to that, xAI had taken ownership of the platform formerly known as Twitter, now X.com, or just X.

So the proverbial Matryoshka doll of Elon’s companies now looks like this: SpaceX → Starlink → xAI → X.

So, when SpaceX lists, investors essentially get four companies in one.

But for all the hype about the space stuff, I think X and its crypto future might be the more exciting opportunity.

The billion-dollar Cashtag

On the evening of Tuesday, 14 April, X rolled out a feature called Cashtags.

Type $BTC, $ETH, $DOGE, $TSLA, $NVDA, or paste a Solana or Base contract address into the timeline, tap it, and up pops a live price chart, sentiment data, related posts, and for Canadian iPhone users (for now) a buy button that routes straight into Wealthsimple, the country’s biggest digital brokerage.

Three days later, Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, posted some numbers that blew me away:

$1 billion in trading volume. 

In just three days. 

From a pilot in one country.

A billion dollars in 72 hours out of a pilot that small is a very serious shot across the bow of every brokerage and exchange on the planet.

What makes this powerful for X is that it doesn’t need to acquire a whole bunch of users. It just needs to put a buy button next to a ticker and allow its users to buy straight from the app.

This is only on iPhone for now, too. Android support and a global rollout are coming. A US brokerage partner will follow. Expect the same in the UK, in Asia, in Australia… everywhere.

For now, X is not a broker, does not execute trades, and does not handle or hold money.

My take is, it soon will.

There’s no way Elon isn’t looking at this to become the central financial app of the future. The “Everything App” he’s promised for so long.

Start off as a giant social and data network, add a payments rail, plug in a partner, hit $1 billion in volume in three days… and suddenly the question becomes: Why not do it all in-house?

Cashtags handles not just the dominant financial system today, but it’s built for what comes next…

Crypto.

Memecoins, Solana and Base contract addresses, Bitcoin, DOGE!

This is a financial super app being built with crypto rails, not just bolted on as an afterthought to appease the degens.

This means you can expect stablecoins for payments inside X Money… Bitcoin and the major crypto tradeable directly from your X feed.

And let’s not forget memecoin culture is very much already a part of X. 

Dogecoin and every other major related “dog coin” is a by-product of Elon’s fascination with crypto and culture.

All of it, in my view, has been Musk’s plan since he wrote the $44 billion cheque for Twitter.

Everyone called it the worst deal in corporate history. But I think they missed the genius of it all. 

SpaceDOGE

So, back to the SpaceX IPO.

The June listing will be marketed as a bet on space. Starlink, Starship, orbital data centre compute, the Mars story. All of that is real, and all of that is interesting and makes your imagination run wild.

But buried in the same cap table is a product that just did $1 billion of volume in three days on an iPhone pilot.

A real product with licences, a user base and the founder’s ambition to become the dominant retail venue for equities, crypto, stablecoins, and payments globally.

I think it could be bigger than Coinbase, bigger than Binance, bigger than Robinhood. In fact, you could combine all of those into one and still come short of what X’s value could become.

The rockets will sell the IPO. But the real value is… the app.

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research