The US IPO market just woke up from a multi-year nap, and it chose violence. Year-to-date proceeds have already crossed the $110 billion mark as of mid-June, with more than $120 billion expected once pending deals close out. The centerpiece of this revival: SpaceX’s $75 billion IPO on June 12, which instantly became the largest initial public offering in history.

SpaceX sets the tone for a record year

SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each, selling 555.6 million shares and landing at a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion. That figure makes Elon Musk’s rocket company the seventh-most valuable publicly traded firm in the United States.

To put the $75 billion raise in perspective, it alone accounts for nearly half of all IPO proceeds generated in the US this year. Goldman Sachs now forecasts total US IPO proceeds will hit a record $160 billion for the full year of 2026. That would represent a roughly fourfold increase compared to the subdued activity of prior years, when high interest rates and choppy valuations kept many companies on the sidelines.

The first quarter already signaled what was coming. Global equity issuance grew 43% year-over-year in Q1.

The pipeline behind SpaceX reads like a who’s-who of Silicon Valley’s most valuable private companies. Anthropic, Databricks, and OpenAI are all reportedly positioned to follow SpaceX into the public markets.

Tokenized IPO access enters the picture

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, launched a product called xStocks in early June. The platform lets retail investors buy tokenized versions of traditional equities, including access to IPOs at their original offering prices. SpaceX was the inaugural listing on xStocks, which means that retail investors who previously had zero shot at participating in a blue-chip IPO allocation could, for the first time, get in at the same price as institutional players.

There’s also the question of whether tokenized IPO access will face regulatory scrutiny. Offering equity-like products through crypto rails is exactly the kind of innovation that tends to attract attention from the SEC, particularly when retail investors are involved. Payward’s xStocks product operates in a gray area that regulators will almost certainly want to define more clearly.

With $110.9 billion in year-to-date proceeds already booked, a record-setting SpaceX debut in the rearview mirror, and a lineup of AI heavyweights including Anthropic, Databricks, and OpenAI waiting in the wings, 2026 is shaping up to be the most consequential year for US public offerings in recent memory.