At SpaceX the lockup does not expire on a single day but in fixed stages. The next of these dates is September 9, 2026, followed by September 24, October 9, October 24 and, as the closing point, December 8, 2026. If you hold a tokenized SPCX share, this calendar concerns you just as much as a shareholder on the Nasdaq, even though you own no stock at all. This article sorts the dates, works out how many shares sit behind each stage, and shows the point where stock and token part ways.
A lockup means that anyone who held shares before the listing is barred from selling them for a set period. The purpose is to stop early shareholders from flooding the market on the first day of trading. When the period ends, those shares join the freely tradable pool, the free float. Whether anyone actually sells is up to the holder alone; the release only permits it.
A tokenized stock is not a share in a company but a token on a blockchain that tracks the price of a deposited share and whose value is guaranteed by an issuer. The price of that token hangs on the price of the underlying. So when additional shares become sellable on September 9 and the price reacts, your token carries that move with it, without you being able to trade on the Nasdaq at all.
This exact seam has so far been left uncovered in German-language coverage. Plenty of outlets report the price reaction; what the chain of dates means for someone holding the value as a token in a crypto account appears nowhere. This article closes that gap.
The dates are not an estimate from a research house. They are named in the prospectus (Form 424B4) that SpaceX filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 12, 2026. The prospectus distinguishes three groups of shares, and only one of them is due for release this autumn.
All remaining outstanding shares are subject, according to the prospectus, to a lockup running to the 180th day after the prospectus date, that is to December 8, 2026. This group carries automatic early releases:
Several large shareholders agreed to an extended period that ends only after second-quarter 2027 results. Early releases start there in the first quarter of 2027, among them on March 18, 2027 and May 17, 2027.
The founder's shares are locked until the 366th day after the prospectus date, that is to June 12, 2027, and expressly without any early release. Together with the extended group they account for around 7.8 billion shares, more than 63 percent of all shares outstanding immediately before the listing, according to the prospectus.
For this year that means the entire pressure comes from Group 1. The large blocks held by the founder and the anchor shareholders stay locked through 2026.
The prospectus gives percentages, not share counts, and the percentages refer to the pool of the 180-day group rather than to every share in the company. A defensible order of magnitude can still be derived. CNN reported on August 6, 2026 that up to 911.5 million shares were released that day; that was the 20 percent stage. Working backwards puts the pool at around 4.56 billion shares, and 7 percent of that is roughly 320 million shares per date.
That figure is a back-of-the-envelope calculation from two documented statements and not a company disclosure. As an order of magnitude it serves: each of the five autumn stages is about half the size of the first release in August, and all five together come to roughly one and a half times it.
For comparison the starting position, also following the CNN account of August 6: around 640 million shares were sold in the listing, less than 5 percent of all shares. After the first release, around 12 percent was tradable. In total there are more than 7.5 billion Class A shares and more than 5.5 billion Class B shares.
The decisive difference lies in the legal nature. A share is a stake in the company and carries voting and dividend rights. A stock token is a claim against the issuer, who promises to track the value of the deposited share. What you actually hold with a tokenized stock, and which rights are missing, we took apart in the explainer Tokenized stocks: why you do not own a share.
For the lockup this produces an uncomfortable asymmetry. You are fully exposed to the price risk of the releases, because the token follows the underlying. You have no part in the rights that could protect a shareholder in such a situation: no vote, no direct relationship with the company, no position in the share register. Your counterparty is the issuer of the token and the platform where you hold it.
That this construction creaks under pressure was visible at the start. Looking back at the first day of trading, CryptoTicker described on June 13, 2026 how the tokenized versions of SPCX stock stumbled, and reported the same day that several venues received no allocation from the tranche and cancelled customer orders. Anyone who believed they had bought got their money back instead of a token.
Issuer risk describes the danger that whoever issues a security or a token cannot honour their commitment. With a tokenized stock this sits at the centre of the construction: your position is worth as much as the issuer's promise holds.
Ahead of a release date it is therefore worth reading up on three points before you think about prices. First: who issues the token, and under whose supervision does that issuer stand? Second: is there a binding redemption promise, and at what price is redemption made? Third: what happens to your position if the platform suspends trading while the underlying falls? Trading suspended on the very day of a release is the case you want to think through in advance.
If those questions go unanswered for you, that is already the answer. Where a provider discloses supervision, custody and redemption, you can check it; our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges ranks providers by exactly these features.
Here lies the point German coverage has missed so far. The prospectus names calendar days, not trading days. Four of the five autumn dates fall on weekdays: September 9 on a Wednesday, September 24 on a Thursday, October 9 on a Friday, December 8 on a Tuesday. October 24, 2026 falls on a Saturday.
The Nasdaq is closed that day. A shareholder can react to the release on Monday at the earliest, and until then the share price does not move. A stock token, by contrast, trades around the clock, weekends included. The consequence: over the weekend the token reflects only what the crypto market makes of the release, without the reference price it otherwise orients itself by.
Two things come together here. At the weekend the order book is thinner, because fewer participants are active; smaller orders then move the price further. And the premium, the gap between the token price and the last closing price of the share, can open wide in either direction, because no trading in the underlying pulls it back. Anyone selling into an order book like that on a Saturday evening pays that gap.
In practice: for this date the orderly market ends on the Friday evening before. Anyone wanting to change a position ahead of the release has a reliable reference price behind them until then.
The first stage provides the best experience available, and it turned out differently than expected. On August 5, 2026, the day before the release, the stock fell by almost 14 percent and closed at $108.27 according to CNN, an all-time low. On August 6, when up to 911.5 million shares were released, the price rose by more than 6 percent.
The market had therefore anticipated the release, and the date itself brought relief instead of pressure. A second point from the same account: on both days retail participation was as high as it had last been in the week after the listing, and on balance there was net buying every trading day.
The price condition from the prospectus shows how far the stock stood from its offer price. The additional 10 percent stage would have required a price at least 30 percent above the offer price of $135, that is around $175.50. With a closing price of $108.27 the day before, that mark was out of reach. For context: at that point the stock stood more than 40 percent below its record high of June 16 and 15 percent below the offer price.
One date is deliberately missing from the calendar. The 28 percent stage hangs on the publication of third-quarter 2026 results, and that date is not yet fixed. It is the largest single stage of the year, and it can fall between October 24 and December 8. On top of that comes the quarterly rebalancing of the Nasdaq 100 in September: because that index weights the freely tradable pool among other things, the stock's weight grows with every release.
None of this yields a trading recommendation. What it does yield is a checklist. The list costs you twenty minutes and answers the questions that count when it matters.
Point five sounds like bookkeeping and is the most expensive one when it is missing. Why, is in the next section.
A sale around a lockup release date is rarely tax-neutral, and with tokenized stocks the treatment differs from selling a share through a broker. The reason lies in the classification: a token that tracks a share is not automatically treated like a share. Which periods and which records apply in Germany, we wrote up in detail in Taxing tokenized stocks in Germany.
For this autumn's chain of dates one thing matters above all. A hurried sale on the Friday evening before October 24 can break a holding period that would have expired four weeks later. Anyone who knows their purchase data sees that in advance. Anyone who first digs it out in the spring finds out too late.
A warning about the self-reporting of trading venues: an annual report from a crypto venue is not a tax certificate in the sense of German law. It is a data extract that you have to check and prepare.
Assessments diverge, and both camps have an argument. All the statements that follow come from CNN's coverage of August 6 and are attributed here to their authors.
Jay Ritter, professor emeritus at the University of Florida and a specialist in listings, places the experience like this: when less selling pressure emerges than expected, the price sometimes even rises on a release; usually it falls, but not always. Ryan Lee of Direxion points to the incentives of early shareholders: anyone who came in long before the listing is sitting on gains and has a reason to sell.
Justus Parmar, founder of Fortuna Investments and invested himself, counters that an inflow of new shares can weigh on any price in the short term but changes nothing about the business picture. Viraj Patel of Vanda points to the demand side and notes that retail investors bought on net on every single trading day.
What both camps share: a release is a supply event, not a verdict on the company. For you as a token holder there is the additional question of whether your platform works on the day it matters.
Up to a further 7 percent of the 180-day group becomes sellable, around 320 million shares by the calculation above. Selling happens only to the extent that holders want it.
No. The lockup concerns early shareholders of the company, not you. You are affected only through the price your token follows.
That is the day the 180-day period ends and the entire remainder of that group becomes sellable. Every date before it releases only a portion.
No. You trade the token on the platform that carries it. The detour via the issuer is exactly the difference this article is about.
Sources to read up on: the 424B4 prospectus at the SEC with the full release calendar, and CNN's coverage of the first release on August 6, 2026.
(As of August 30, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
