Bitcoin Holds $64K as SpaceX Tokenized IPO Refunds $557M, SBF Sentence Upheld

Crypto News Japanese Bitcoin treasury firm Metaplanet capped a turbulent week with a cluster of corporate moves as its shares extended a steep decline. CEO Simon Gerovich signaled openness to a share buyback on X, framing per-share BTC accumulation, or BTC Yield, as the company’s most important metric and pledging to prioritize shareholder value. The firm also agreed to acquire securities broker Siiibo for roughly 2.1 billion yen, with the unit set to be rebranded Metaplanet Securities by August 2026. Separately, the board cut the floor exercise price on its 27th series of stock warrants from 298 yen to 187 yen, underscoring pressure on a stock down about 44% year-to-date. Crypto traders effectively built a 24-hour pricing venue for Elon Musk’s SpaceX ahead of its Nasdaq debut. Over the three days preceding the listing, perpetual futures tracking the rocket maker drew more than $1 billion in volume, with decentralized exchange Hyperliquid leading the market. The synthetic SPCX contract, which carries no ownership or voting rights, traded near $170 just before listing. Those levels proved prescient: the stock opened at $150, spiked to $176, and closed near $160 on its first session. The episode showed how on-chain venues can perform genuine price discovery on pre-IPO equities that traditional markets cannot price around the clock. Demand for tokenized SpaceX exposure collapsed into a messy unwind across major exchanges. On-chain data tracked roughly $557 million in USDC subscriptions from 27,689 wallets through Binance Wallet’s campaign before it was scrapped, after partner xStocks failed to secure enough underlying shares. Bybit and Bitget halted their own tokenized SpaceX offerings and moved to refund participants in full; Bitget added gas-fee vouchers and whitelist priority for future sales. Smaller wallets made up over 81% of participants, though more than 100 addresses each subscribed above $500,000. The breakdown exposed the fragility of share-backed products built on the blockchain when demand concentrates faster than custody can deliver. A parallel regulatory shift could reshape how such products trade in the United States. On June 11, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed scrapping Rule 611, the trade-through provision at the heart of Regulation NMS that has governed U.S. equity markets for two decades. For crypto firms and banks, the official filing removes a structural barrier to bringing tokenized equities on-chain, potentially aligning token-based settlement with conventional stock trading. The timing is notable given the SpaceX episode, where round-the-clock tokenized markets ran ahead of regulation. Easing the trade-through mandate could accelerate the convergence of tokenized securities and decentralized finance infrastructure that exchanges have been racing to build. Washington’s broader crypto market-structure push hit a familiar snag over developer protections. At a June 10 White House meeting, administration officials and roughly 20 law enforcement representatives spent 90 minutes debating Section 604 of the Senate CLARITY Act draft, which shields non-controlling developers and self-custody providers from money-transmitter treatment. Police groups warn the safe harbor could limit prosecution of crypto-linked financial crime, while industry advocates, backed by 160 former national-security officials, counter that the bill strengthens oversight. The math remains tight: the legislation needs 60 Senate votes, requiring at least seven Democrats, before the chamber’s August recess effectively closes the window. A federal appeals court delivered a decisive blow to former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried. The Second Circuit upheld his 2024 conviction on seven fraud, conspiracy, and money-laundering counts, affirming both his 25-year prison sentence and roughly $11 billion in forfeiture. The three-judge panel rejected arguments that FTX held sufficient assets to avoid investor losses, citing a 2025 Supreme Court precedent establishing that federal fraud is complete once deception induces a property transfer. Testimony from former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang, describing misused customer funds, was deemed robust. Bankman-Fried has separately petitioned President Trump for a pardon. Taken together, these threads trace a single arc: traditional finance and crypto rails are fusing faster than the rules, custody, and courts around them can adapt. SpaceX’s tokenized stumble, the SEC’s Rule 611 proposal, and the CLARITY standoff all map the same frontier, while the SBF ruling closes out crypto’s last great fraud cycle. COINOTAG’s aggregate data frames the caution: our Fear & Greed Index sits at 18, deep in extreme fear, Bitcoin dominance has climbed to 70.4%, and total market capitalization stands near $1.83 trillion. That defensive rotation into Bitcoin, set against a broader bear-market mood, suggests capital is consolidating while the tokenization experiment matures.