The booming U.S. stock market has, since early 2025, spurred hundreds of IPOs and, in most cases, these new offerings have delivered fine returns. But when it comes to newly-public crypto companies, their stock performance has, with two notable exceptions, been a disaster. Now, as another crop of crypto IPOs waits in the wings, it’s worth asking whether the sector as a whole is ready for primetime in the public markets.
To learn the state of play, I reviewed the share price performance of the recent vintage of 20 or so publicly-listed crypto companies. It’s not a pretty picture. Among the companies that pursued a traditional IPO, only Circle is trading close to its listing price—and that’s primarily thanks to the colossal opening day pop the company enjoyed back in June of 2025. The second best performer among the recent crypto IPO class is the blockchain-based mortgage lender, Figure, which is down around 19% from its listing day last September. That’s not calamitous, but it’s still ugly, especially when compared to the broader S&P 500, which has returned around 13% during that time.
Other notable names in the recent crypto IPO class—the longtime custodian BitGo, the exchange service Bullish, and the multi-asset trading app eToro—have fared even worse, posting share price declines of 55%-65%. Then there is Gemini, whose brief tenure as a public company has been simply gruesome. Since going public last September, the Winklevoss-led firm has seen its share price shrivel nearly 90% and its market cap decline from $3.3 billion to around half a billion.
Then there is the other crop of crypto firms that went public using a non-traditional process such as a SPAC. Notable names in this batch include billionaire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy and tokenization service Securitize, both of which have been public market flops, but not outright debacles. The same can’t be said for crypto asset manager CoinShares, whose stock is down over 50% since its debut, or the Eric Trump-backed American Bitcoin, which is down over 93%. The one stand-out among the non-traditional crypto IPOs is Hyperliquid Strategies, a digital asset treasury for HYPE that is up over 200% since going public earlier this year.
So what’s going on here? Why can’t this new batch of crypto companies, aside from Circle and Hyperliquid, hold their own when the stock market as a whole has been soaring, and when the White House is in their corner? My hunch is the situation can be explained in part by frothy market conditions. In a more disciplined environment, underwriters and big investors would have stayed away from many of these companies, but the frothy conditions of 2025 led them to take a flyer on nearly any IPO.
But there are also more specific business reasons to explain the poor performance. Namely, many of these laggards—including Gemini, Bullish and BitGo—are offering commodity services in a hyper competitive market, and don’t have the ability to scale or provide much in the way of extra value. There was a time when you could make it as a second-tier player offering services like custody or crypto trading. Today, though, these firms face competition not only from crypto natives like Coinbase, but a host of new players ranging from big fintech to traditional Wall Street firms—all of which have stronger brands and deeper pockets.
This raises the question of how the next group of crypto companies slated to go public might fare. Those include Payward (formerly Kraken), the wallet service MetaMask and hardware maker Ledger—all of which have signaled pretty clearly they want to IPO soon. Other potential names include payment rails service MoonPay, which just announced a CFO hire, and longtime blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis.
If there are lessons from the 2025 wave of crypto IPOs, the most obvious is that investors should proceed with caution. But it’s also apparent that some blockchain-first firms that can succeed as public companies—provided they have scale and a strong product like Circle, or a strong executive team with a clever business model like Hyperliquid Strategies.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Sam Altman's World rolled out a blockchain-based 'proof of human' tool that is being deployed by Zoom, Bain Capital and other big names (Fortune)
The latest OpenAI agent to go rogue broke into a locked crypto wallet in order to help itself to testnet tokens (Fortune)
A startup called Fission, which provides liquidity to the tokenized asset market, raised $10 million in a round led by Pantera (Fortune)
In the latest example of token launches falling out of favor Polymarket has been walking back earlier hints that it would issue one (Bloomberg)
Crypto prices are holding up in choppy markets thanks to a weaker USD and investors decoupling the price of BTC and ETH from tech stocks (WSJ)
Meme of the moment
Kudos to longtime crypto journalist Ben Schiller for the launch of his off-Broadway Bitcoin play
