Velvet Capital’s VELVET token has rocketed more than 86% over the past 24 hours — and over 1,300% in a week — as traders pile into its newly launched on-chain access to pre-IPO shares of SpaceX, timed to the rocket company’s record-breaking market debut.
The VELVET token traded near $1.71 on Friday, with a market capitalization around $738 million on roughly $106 million of daily volume, according to market data. The move has massively outpaced a broadly flat crypto market, making VELVET one of the day’s standout gainers—but on-chain data complicates the bullish narrative.
The SpaceX Pre-IPO Catalyst
The rally traces to Velvet Capital’s June 3 integration with Trade.xyz, which brought global markets — stocks, commodities, and crucially, leveraged pre-IPO exposure to private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic—directly into its on-chain trading terminal. The timing was the point. The integration landed just ahead of SpaceX’s IPO, which priced today as the largest in history at $135 a share and a roughly $1.77 trillion valuation, making the listing the single hottest narrative in markets.
VELVET became a token proxy for a platform riding that wave. The appetite for tokenized real-world assets and pre-IPO access has been building for months, and Velvet handed traders a concrete reason to buy. It is not alone in the space — at least eight major crypto platforms rushed to offer SpaceX exposure before a single share traded, with Velvet routing pre-IPO perpetuals through Trade.xyz and Ventuals — but the VELVET token gave speculators a single, high-beta way to bet on the trend.
A Buyback Flywheel and Frenzied Speculation
The token’s design amplified the move. Velvet directs 50% of its protocol fees into buying back VELVET for veVELVET stakers, tying platform usage to token demand and creating a reflexive bid as activity spiked. Backed by YZi Labs—the fund formerly known as Binance Labs—and counting 100,000-plus users, Velvet bills itself as a “DeFAI” operating system, and traders have drawn comparisons to past Binance-Labs-linked trading terminals that delivered outsized runs.
The frenzy pushed technicals to extremes, with the token deeply overbought and the parabolic move attracting high-leverage speculation on both continuation and reversal. A separate, thinner driver also circulated: a social media rumor about a comeback from the K-pop group Red Velvet briefly added fuel, helping trigger millions in short liquidations—a reminder of how sentiment-driven the rally has been.
The Red Flag: Team Wallets Move $19.8 Million to Exchanges
The bullish story comes with an on-chain caveat that traders are weighing carefully. On-chain analyst EmberCN flagged that over the three-day window of the steepest gains, wallets linked to the Velvet team transferred roughly 22 million VELVET — worth about $19.8 million — to exchanges including Bitget, Gate, and KuCoin, with market maker DWF Labs moving an additional $6 million worth. Transferring tokens to exchanges is often a precursor to selling, and the timing alongside a ten-fold price move has drawn scrutiny.
It is important to be precise: moving tokens to exchanges is an observation, not proof of intent, and the transfers do not by themselves establish that insiders are selling. Still, the activity, combined with team and backer token unlocks scheduled to begin in July 2026, leaves a supply overhang that could cap the rally or amplify any reversal.
What to Watch
The setup is bullish momentum at extreme risk. With the token parabolic and overbought, the clearest near-term signals are on-chain: sustained flows from team and VC wallets to exchanges would point to distribution, while a slowdown could fuel another leg up.
Traders are watching the $1.50 level as support, with $1.80–$2.00 the upside target and a break lower risking a swift correction toward $1.15 as leverage unwinds. Worth flagging too is that the pre-IPO products underpinning the narrative carry their own risks—a Ventuals SpaceX oracle malfunction triggered a $1.5 million liquidation cascade in May. For now, VELVET’s surge rests on a genuine product narrative and a once-in-a-cycle IPO event, but how much of the move is conviction versus exit liquidity is the question the market is still answering.
