From Circle to Bullish: Crypto Wraps Up ‘Bellwether Year’ for IPOs

This year has arguably been the biggest and most consequential on record for crypto IPOs.

A surge in retail interest, renewed political tailwinds, and a reopened U.S. IPO market helped push a wave of crypto firms onto public exchanges. Reuters described a “rush to Wall Street IPOs” driven by the year’s crypto resurgence, while Barron’s reported that crypto flotations were “making Wall Street go wild.”

Against that backdrop, companies from exchanges to stablecoin issuers raced to tap public markets—setting the stage for an unusually crowded IPO calendar.

For a long time, the industry’s one big IPO win was Coinbase’s Nasdaq debut in 2021. The years since then were filled with crypto firms trying—but not always succeeding—to go public via SPAC, or special purpose acquisition companies. A SPAC is a publicly traded shell company that raises money from investors and then merges with a private firm to take it public without a traditional IPO.

Two notable 2025 IPOs, USDC issuer Circle and crypto exchange Bullish, were preceded by such attempts.

Circle first tried to go public in 2021 through a merger with Concord Acquisition Corp. The deal would have valued the company at up to $9 billion, but it was terminated in late 2022 after repeated delays and changing market conditions.

When Circle did finally make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this year, it was so popular with investors that NYSE halted trading three times within the first hour. But the company has seen its momentum slow as the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates and investors fret that it’ll impact interest earned on the cash reserves that back USDC stablecoins.

“I see the Circle IPO as a bellwether for the IPO markets this year,” New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin said at the time, “not just for crypto listings.”

Bullish also saw its share price skyrocket when it went public in August. The crypto exchange has a SPAC backstory similar to Circle’s. The company announced it was going public in 2021, but called the deal off at the end of 2022 citing “time constraints and market conditions.”

Trading platform eToro, not strictly a crypto company, saw its valuation soar to $5.4 billion after its Nasdaq debut in May. The company had scaled back its crypto offerings after a 2024 settlement with the SEC. But it now lists 82 different crypto assets as of this writing.

Not every company that explored going public this year got over the finish line, however. Crypto prime brokerage FalconX is rumored to be mulling an IPO, unnamed sources told Decrypt. But as the year winds down, there’s been no official acknowledgement of those plans and no paperwork filed with the SEC.

Kraken, meanwhile, filed for its IPO following the close of an $800 million raise in November. The crypto exchange is now valued at $20 billion. The company has already signaled that it wants to get its shares trading quickly, saying it plans to make its debut as soon as the SEC completes its review process and subject to market conditions.

There are others making their way to the starting line. BitGo, Grayscale, Blockchain.com, and others explored or openly discussed IPO plans as market conditions improved.

If 2025 marked the industry’s return to public markets, it may also have set the stage for an even larger class of crypto IPOs in the coming year.