Circle Defies the Trend: While IPO Doors Slam Shut for Crypto Firms, One Giant Stands Unscathed

The narrative is bleak: a toxic cocktail of regulatory headwinds and market skepticism is slamming the IPO window shut for crypto companies. Yet, amidst the carnage, one name stands conspicuously untouched—Circle.

The Great IPO Lockout

Forget ringing the bell. For most digital asset firms, the path to public markets now looks like a dead end. Investor appetite has soured, regulators are circling, and the once-promising pipeline has all but dried up. It's a classic risk-off pivot—Wall Street's favorite dance when uncertainty looms.

Circle's Unshakable Fortress

So how does Circle bypass the doom? It built a fortress where others pitched tents. While rivals chased speculative tokenomics, Circle doubled down on the boring stuff: compliance, banking partnerships, and a relentless focus on the USDC stablecoin as utility infrastructure, not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's the anti-meme coin—predictable, sturdy, and, frankly, a bit dull for the crypto degenerates. (A cynical finance jab: In a sector obsessed with moonshots, sometimes the real alpha is just acting like a grown-up bank.)

The New Benchmark

Circle's resilience rewrites the playbook. It proves that in crypto's volatile landscape, the ultimate disruption might not be a flashy new blockchain, but a company that masters the old-world rules well enough to earn a seat at the big table—IPO window be damned.

The strategic split: infrastructure vs. beta

Circle's outperformance against the rest of the cohort isn't an accident of timing.

The company generates revenue from USDC reserves, essentially arbitrage the spread between Treasury yields and the zero interest it pays stablecoin holders.

That model works regardless of whether Bitcoin trades at $100,000 or $50,000, which insulates Circle from the pure directional bet that defines exchanges like Gemini or trading platforms like eToro.

When crypto spot volumes crater, those businesses lose fees immediately. Circle keeps earning.

Figment's modest 11% gain reflects a similar logic. Staking infrastructure depends on proof-of-stake network adoption, not speculative trading activity. As long as Ethereum, Solana, and other PoS chains keep validating blocks, Figment collects its cut.

eToro, Bullish, and Gemini, by contrast, are fee machines tethered directly to retail enthusiasm. When bitcoin dipped 8.5% in 2025, and altcoin volumes followed, those platforms saw trading activity evaporate.

Investors who bought the IPOs expecting sustained crypto mania got caught holding Leveraged downside instead. The 50%-plus losses don't reflect broken businesses, they reflect the market repricing what “crypto equity” actually means when the underlying asset wobbles.

Public investors demanded compensation for that volatility, and the stock prices adjusted accordingly.

The lesson for 2026 is that crypto equities are bifurcating. On one side sit companies with durable, counter-cyclical, or quasi-infrastructure business models that can justify premium valuations even when Bitcoin chops sideways.

On the other side, platforms whose earnings MOVE in lockstep with speculative fervor. The former can tap public markets whenever the IPO window opens. The latter needs Bitcoin at all-time highs to make the underwriting math work.

2025 was a test run, not a victory lap

Circle and Figment proved that real businesses can go public and hold value. Gemini, eToro, and Bullish proved that investors won't blindly chase crypto beta in equity FORM anymore.

That repricing happened fast. By late November, Bloomberg Law noted that new US IPOs posted slightly negative returns in the fourth quarter, even as the S&P eked out gains, with crypto IPOs “among the biggest casualties” of the quarter's drawdown.

The message was clear: public investors will still buy crypto risk, but only at the right price and with earnings visibility. The “anything with a blockchain” phase ended somewhere between Circle's June debut and Gemini's December collapse.

Consensys joining the queue signals confidence that 2026 remains viable, but also that founders know the opportunity won't last forever. If rates rise, if Bitcoin corrects hard, or if capital rotates back to native token speculation, the equity route closes.

The cohort that went public in 2025 will have gotten out just in time. The stragglers might wait years for another shot.

What the scorecard signals for 2026 risk appetite

The 2025 IPO cohort's underperformance relative to Bitcoin suggests that equity investors are treating these businesses as leveraged, fee-driven proxies on the cycle rather than secular growth stories.

That sets the bar higher for 2026. Companies hoping to go public will need to demonstrate cash generation that survives a flat or down market, not just hockey-stick projections that assume sustained retail euphoria.

But Circle's retention of gains points to durable demand for regulated crypto infrastructure.
Investors still want exposure to stablecoin rails, tokenization platforms, and custody providers, businesses where regulation and earnings are transparent.

That appetite didn't vanish when Bitcoin dipped, it just became more selective.

Nasdaq expects billion-dollar-plus listings to jump in 2026, with U.S. IPO proceeds up roughly 80% in 2025 versus 2024. Falling rates, high valuations, and broad market sentiment support that view.

But the winners' list remains narrow. A tech-capital-markets analysis of 2025 IPO gainers showed that AI and crypto names like CoreWeave and Circle dominated, with very few breakouts outside those themes. The risk budget for 2026 is concentrated rather than broad.

Any new crypto listing will need to fit into a clear structural narrative, such as stablecoin infrastructure, tokenized assets, on-chain AI integration, or institutional custody, to compete for that capital.

A16z's “State of Crypto 2025” frames the year as one of institutional adoption, with Circle's IPO marking the moment stablecoin issuers became mainstream financial institutions.

The report notes that exchange-traded products now hold about $175 billion in crypto assets, up 169% year-over-year, and that public “digital asset treasury” companies control roughly 4% of the combined Bitcoin and ethereum supply.

Together, ETPs and treasury plays account for around 10% of outstanding BTC and ETH. That's a deepening pipeline between capital markets and tokens, and the IPO cohort represents another node in that infrastructure.

But institutional participation remains shallow. Reuters reported mid-year that less than 5% of spot Bitcoin ETF assets are held by pensions and endowments, with another 10-15% held by hedge funds and wealth managers.

Most flows still come from retail. As genuinely long-horizon institutions enter, they're more likely to start with regulated wrappers, ETFs, listed exchanges, stablecoin issuers, than with direct altcoin bets.

The 2025 IPO scorecard previews the kind of risk those institutions will tolerate on their books: steady, cash-generative businesses with clear compliance frameworks, not speculative trading platforms levered to meme-coin volume.

The real question for 2026

The 2025 cohort's performance doesn't settle the question of whether crypto IPOs are a durable asset class. It clarifies the terms on which public markets will engage. Investors will underwrite crypto businesses, but they're done paying growth-stock multiples for cyclical fee streams.

Circle's resilience shows there's an appetite for infrastructure plays that generate revenue independent of token-price euphoria. Gemini's 70% collapse shows there's no appetite for platforms whose earnings disappear the moment retail loses interest.

That creates a narrow path for 2026. The regulatory environment is clearer and more stable, stablecoins are mainstream, and the general IPO window is open.

But crypto risk is increasingly expressed through public market structures, such as ETFs, corporate treasuries, and now a scrutinized IPO cohort, rather than through token speculation.

The companies that thread that needle next year will be those that convince investors they're building financial plumbing, not riding a wave. The ones that can't will wait for the next cycle, whenever that arrives.