Six crypto firms that listed on U.S. exchanges between September 2025 and early 2026 have shed a combined $18 billion-plus in market capitalization from their opening-day valuations. Gemini (GEMI) leads the wreckage at 89% below its debut price. Four more companies — BitGo, Bullish, eToro, and Fi...
"The market is cooled down and investors' appetite has been sold to AI." — Kay Kyeongsik Woo, Founder, Tada
Six crypto firms that listed on U.S. exchanges between September 2025 and early 2026 have shed a combined $18 billion-plus in market capitalization from their opening-day valuations. Gemini (GEMI) leads the wreckage at 89% below its debut price. Four more companies — BitGo, Bullish, eToro, and Figure — trade below their first-trade prints. Only Circle (CRCL) remains above its opening price, though it too has retreated from post-IPO highs.
The damage has frozen the pipeline. Kraken parent Payward, Grayscale, Consensys, Ledger, and Bitpanda have all paused or delayed U.S. listing plans. Meanwhile, SpaceX's record $75 billion IPO on June 12 — the largest equity offering in financial history — and forthcoming listings from OpenAI and Anthropic are absorbing institutional capital at a rate that leaves crypto issuers without a viable window. Fundstrat Head of Digital Asset Strategy Sean Farrell told CoinDesk that crypto trading volumes are down roughly 75% year-to-date, pressuring valuations across the sector.
Six crypto-native companies completed U.S. public listings in the current cycle. Their performance from first-trade price through early July 2026:
| Company | Ticker | IPO/Listing Date | Opening Price | Price (Jul 2026) | Decline from Open | |---------|--------|-------------------|---------------|-------------------|-------------------| | Gemini | GEMI | Sep 2025 | $37.00 | ~$4.19 | -89% | | BitGo | BTGO | Jan 2026 | $22.43 | ~$5.15 | -77% | | Bullish | BLSH | 2025 | $90.00 | ~$26.10 | -71% | | eToro | ETOR | 2025 | $69.69 | ~$41.00 | -42% | | Figure | FIGR | 2026 | $36.00 | ~$30.96 | -14% | | Circle | CRCL | 2025 | $69.00 | ~$64.86 | -6% |
When measured against IPO offering prices rather than first-trade prices, the picture shifts modestly. Circle trades 110% above its $31 offering price. Figure sits 24% above its $25 offering. The other four remain below their IPO offering levels.
The divergence is instructive. Circle generates revenue from USDC yield on reserves — a model tied to interest rates, not trading volume. Figure derives income from blockchain-based lending and financial infrastructure. The four worst performers — Gemini, BitGo, Bullish, eToro — depend primarily on exchange trading fees, which have collapsed alongside spot volumes.
Gemini's trajectory encapsulates the structural problem. The exchange debuted in September 2025 at a valuation exceeding $2.2 billion, built on exchange volumes that were already eroding at the time of pricing. Its listing coincided with the exact month the broader crypto market topped.
Three consecutive quarters of industry-wide contraction followed. Fee compression across competing exchanges accelerated. By Q1 2026, Gemini reported revenue of $50.3 million — up 42% year-over-year from a depressed base, but paired with a net loss of $109 million. The company reported earnings of -$0.93 per share, narrowly beating estimates of -$1.05.
Citi analyst Peter Christiansen downgraded GEMI to Sell in March 2026 and cut the price target from $13 to $5.50, citing delayed profitability and stalled U.S. crypto legislation. In April, he cut again to $4, noting a "bigger than expected" dip in spot activity. Citi cited four primary concerns: declining user activity, significant restructuring, cyclical revenue headwinds, and the slowing pace of regulatory clarity.
A $100 million private placement from Winklevoss Capital Fund at $14 per share — funded in bitcoin — provided liquidity but signaled the founders' need to backstop their own company. The stock now trades at approximately 70% below that private placement price.
The weak post-listing performance of the class of 2025-2026 has cascaded into the pipeline. At least five major crypto firms have paused or delayed U.S. listing plans:
Kraken (Payward): Filed a confidential S-1 in November 2025 at a $20 billion implied valuation. Paused the listing in March 2026 after weak market conditions. A subsequent $200 million investment from Deutsche Börse in April valued the company at approximately $13.3 billion — a 33% markdown. Payward cut 150 staff in May. Bloomberg reported the IPO may slip to 2027. Despite Q1 adjusted revenue of $507 million (up 3% YoY), the company labeled the quarter its "toughest in four years."
Grayscale: Filed confidentially last November. Paused preparations in late May 2026, unlikely to resume before Q4. Revenue dropped 20% during the first nine months of 2025. However, the firm's Ethereum Staking Mini ETF pulled in $337 million in Q1 2026 inflows, the top-performing U.S. exchange-traded product launch of the quarter.
Consensys: Suspended listing plans. No updated timeline disclosed.
Ledger: Paused its planned IPO to avoid the crypto market slump.
Blockchain.com: Bucking the trend, the company filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO, signaling at least one firm believes the window can still work.
The crypto IPO freeze is not occurring in a vacuum. A parallel capital supercycle in artificial intelligence is consuming the institutional attention and allocation that crypto firms need.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share on June 11 and debuted on Nasdaq under SPCX on June 12, raising $75 billion — the largest equity offering in financial history, surpassing Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion record from 2019. The stock closed at $161 on its first day, valuing the company at $2.1 trillion, and subsequently traded as high as $201.80, pushing market capitalization beyond $2.6 trillion at peak.
Two more mega-IPOs loom. SK Hynix's roughly $24.5 billion U.S. listing was more than seven times oversubscribed as of early July. China's CXMT is launching a $4.3 billion Shanghai IPO days later. Both are AI infrastructure plays.
OpenAI and Anthropic confirmed confidential S-1 submissions in June 2026. OpenAI crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue at end-February 2026 and targets a listing at a $1 trillion valuation, likely in late 2026 or 2027. Anthropic led global LLM revenue share in Q1 2026 at 31.4%.
According to CreditSights, combined hyperscaler capital expenditure exceeded $600 billion in 2026, with roughly $450 billion allocated to AI hardware, servers, and networking. This spending is generating a pipeline of AI-linked IPOs that dwarfs the entire crypto sector's public market ambitions.
The numbers make the disparity stark: SpaceX alone raised $75 billion in a single offering. The entire crypto IPO class of 2025-2026 — all six companies combined — raised a fraction of that.
Even the established crypto equity benchmark is straining. Coinbase (COIN) posted Q1 2026 revenue of $1.41 billion, missing Wall Street estimates, with revenue falling 31% year-over-year. The exchange recorded a $394.1 million net loss. COIN shares fell more than 35% year-to-date before rebounding to approximately $165 in early July, driven by product announcements including tokenized stocks for non-U.S. users and the launch of the Open USD stablecoin consortium.
Coinbase's experience underscores the sector-wide challenge: crypto trading market share reached an all-time high of 8.6% in Q1, yet revenue contracted because the pie itself shrank. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell to approximately $2 trillion on June 25, down more than 50% from the late-2025 high.
Morningstar analyst Michael Miller noted that most cryptocurrency companies "are heavily exposed to both the price of cryptocurrency and interest levels in cryptocurrency."
Three converging pressures explain why the crypto IPO market remains frozen:
1. Volume collapse. Industry spot trading volumes fell 38% in Q1 2026 and are down approximately 75% year-to-date, according to Fundstrat. This compresses revenue for fee-dependent businesses, which constitute the majority of recent and planned crypto listings. Bitcoin fell from above $93,000 at the start of 2026 to a low of $58,190 on July 1 — a 33% year-to-date decline.
2. Capital rotation. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $4.5 billion in net outflows in June alone, the worst month since those products launched in January 2024. Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq set repeated all-time highs, driven by AI-linked equities.
3. Regulatory delay. The GENIUS Act stablecoin framework and a broader Crypto Clarity Act remain in legislative process. Reports in early July suggested the Crypto Clarity Act draft could reach a Senate vote later this month, but the legislation faces significant hurdles. The absence of a clear U.S. regulatory framework continues to weigh on institutional appetite for crypto-specific equity issuance.
Recent signals of a potential inflection have appeared. Bitcoin ETFs recorded five straight days of inflows in early July, pulling in $221.7 million on one day — the largest daily haul in two months. Bitcoin stabilized near $62,000. Whether this represents a trend reversal or a dead-cat bounce remains to be seen.
The crypto IPO class of 2025-2026 has delivered returns that will make future issuers' roadshows materially harder. Gemini's 89% decline from its opening price, BitGo's 77% drop, and Bullish's 71% fall represent capital destruction that institutional allocators will not quickly forget.
The frozen pipeline is a rational response to observable conditions: shrinking volumes, a hostile capital market environment where AI offerings are absorbing record sums, and a regulatory framework that remains incomplete. Kraken's valuation markdown from $20 billion to $13.3 billion — before even completing its listing — illustrates how quickly the repricing can occur.
The firms best positioned to eventually list are those with revenue streams decoupled from spot trading volume — stablecoin issuers, infrastructure providers, and custody-focused businesses. For exchange-dependent models, the path to public markets requires either a sustained recovery in crypto trading activity or a fundamental business model transformation. Neither appears imminent.