After Circle and Bullish delivered blockbuster listings in 2025, crypto exchanges rushed toward public markets with a familiar promise: the industry is finally mature enough for Wall Street. However, the latest research from Kaiko shows that it's not as simple as that.
The crypto exchange IPO wave was supposed to prove that the crypto industry had graduated from speculative boomtown to legitimate financial infrastructure. These companies hired Wall Street bankers, appointed compliance chiefs, and refined their pitch decks to emphasize regulated platforms, recurring institutional flows, and revenue streams diversified enough to survive a bear market.
But Kaiko's analysis found that exchange trading activity, investor appetite, and public-market valuations all remain tethered to Bitcoin price in ways most of these exchanges try to obscure.
When Bitcoin rallies, trading volume surges, we see an increase in listings, and Wall Street rewards the sector generously. When Bitcoin stalls or reverses, however, exchange revenue expectations compress fast, and the infrastructure narrative loses its audience.
The central question for anyone buying into crypto IPOs in 2026 is whether they can generate durable earnings when Bitcoin isn't cooperating.
The year the IPO window reopened
To understand why exchanges are scrambling to go public now, it helps to understand how good 2025 looked from a distance.
Circle priced an upsized IPO at $31 per share in June 2025, raising $1.05 billion and valuing the stablecoin issuer at roughly $8 billion on a fully diluted basis. Its shares surged on their NYSE debut, and the reception sent an unambiguous signal: institutional investors had an appetite for regulated crypto exposure and weren't particularly sensitive to valuation.
Bullish followed in August, pricing above range at $37 per share, raising more than $1.1 billion, and debuting at a total valuation of nearly $13.2 billion. Bankers had a genuine pitch to deliver: regulation was improving, institutional participation was deepening, and crypto companies were no longer the fringe startups that had defined the previous cycle.
The enthusiasm was real, and so were the numbers behind it. What the boom obscured, though, was a structural question that IPO markets tend to defer until earnings season makes it unavoidable: can an exchange sustain its revenue when the underlying asset that drives all of its trading activity decides to go quiet?
Gemini gave us an answer to that question, and it proved to be quite an uncomfortable one.
In September 2025, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss lifted Gemini's IPO price range and targeted a valuation of up to $3.08 billion, reflecting genuine investor demand during the crypto rally. By early 2026, a shareholder lawsuit emerged alleging investors were misled around the IPO period: the company had announced a 25% workforce reduction, market exits, and a projected significant annual loss, with the stock down more than 75% from its $28 IPO price.
As CryptoSlate reported at the time of filing, Gemini had already disclosed a $282.5 million net loss in the first half of 2025 alone. It showed how quickly a company can go from an oversubscribed listing to a Bitcoin-cycle casualty when sentiment reverses.
The mechanism behind that reversal is worth understanding, because it applies to every exchange in the current queue. Crypto exchanges make the overwhelming majority of their revenue when people trade, and Bitcoin still drives the conditions that make people want to trade at all. A Bitcoin rally generates retail excitement, institutional repositioning, altcoin speculation, and elevated volatility across the entire asset class, all of which translate directly into exchange fee income.
When Bitcoin stalls, volumes compress across the industry, and the fee income that justified premium valuations starts looking considerably thinner. The public-market pitch frames exchanges as neutral infrastructure collecting fees regardless of market direction, but the operational reality is that many of them still depend on the most emotionally driven asset in finance to make users show up.
Bitcoin as the underwriter
Kraken's own IPO timeline is also a good example of this.
In November 2025, the exchange had confidentially filed for a US listing and was targeting Q1 2026, having recently been valued at $20 billion after a capital raise involving Jane Street and Citadel Securities. CryptoSlate's own report framed the company as having matured into a disciplined financial institution, and the Q3 2025 numbers backed that framing: $648 million in revenue, $178.6 million in adjusted EBITDA, and platform transaction volume of $576.8 billion. All of these were record figures, achieved during a period of elevated Bitcoin activity and favorable crypto sentiment.
But by March 2026, Reuters reported that Kraken had frozen its IPO plans, with sources indicating the company may revisit a listing when market conditions improve. Kraken's delay turns the whole IPO wave into a referendum on whether the window stays open on its own terms, or whether Bitcoin's direction remains the deciding factor.
The most important analytical distinction the 2025 wave introduced is the one between Circle and a crypto exchange, because Wall Street may eventually price them very differently.
Circle's business is tied to stablecoin circulation, interest income from the reserves backing USDC, and payment infrastructure, all revenue streams that are largely uncoupled from elevated trading volumes or Bitcoin-driven volatility.
Exchanges are structurally different, with earnings that move with crypto market activity rather than against a fixed yield. Infrastructure companies like CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange command premium multiples precisely because their earnings hold up across market cycles.
Crypto exchanges are currently asking for comparable treatment while running businesses that collapse when Bitcoin loses momentum. The next phase of public-market crypto listings may end up separating stablecoin infrastructure companies, which can plausibly claim CME-like earnings characteristics, from exchange operators whose revenue profile looks considerably more cyclical when conditions deteriorate.
Public investors reprice stocks every trading day, and that's the particular difficulty exchanges face upon listing. Private capital can afford to wait through a winter; public shareholders tend not to. The exchanges that survive quarterly earnings scrutiny will be those that can demonstrate revenue genuinely diversified across derivatives, custody, institutional services, and staking rather than leaning on spot trading volumes to carry the business.
The crypto exchange IPO wave retains momentum, but it's no longer sufficient for exchanges to argue they survived the last bear market. Public investors want evidence they can earn through the next one. Until that evidence exists in audited quarterly reports, Bitcoin remains the sector's underwriter, market maker, and ultimate judge, whether Wall Street likes it or not.
The post The crypto IPO wave has one big problem: Bitcoin is still in charge appeared first on CryptoSlate.
