A year ago, crypto companies going public felt like the industry’s coming-of-age moment. Between May 2025 and January 2026, Wall Street absorbed the largest wave of crypto listings in history. eToro, Circle, Figure, Bullish, Gemini, and BitGo all went public within eight months, most with euphoric first-day pops. The logic was seductive: if spot Bitcoin ETFs had turned coins into instruments big institutions could buy, then IPOs would do the same for the companies. Equity would be crypto’s ticket into every pension fund and mutual fund in America.
Ten months on, that ticket has been brutally repriced.
Every single major crypto company from that class now trades below its opening price. Gemini, the exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, has been the worst hit, down roughly 89% from its $37 debut to around $4.19. BitGo, the custodian, has lost 77% from its $22.43 first trade. Bullish, backed by prominent industry investors and owner of CoinDesk, is down about 71% from its $90 open. eToro sits 42% below its debut. Even the relative winners are underwater: Figure down 14%, Circle down just 6%, making it the class valedictorian by faint praise.
The collapse is more instructive than it looks. This wasn’t a few bad stock picks. It was a class-wide failure with a clear pattern underneath it, and that pattern carries a precise message for anyone trying to understand which crypto businesses actually survive when the market turns.
The Pattern in the Wreckage
The most revealing detail isn’t how far these stocks fell. It’s which ones fell furthest, because the ranking follows a logic that maps almost perfectly onto business model.
The hardest-hit names, Gemini, BitGo, and Bullish, share a profile: their economics are levered directly to crypto trading volumes, custody balances, and asset prices. They are exchanges and custodians whose revenue rises and falls with market activity. When Bitcoin runs, their revenue runs. When Bitcoin stalls, revenue stalls. And when Bitcoin drops, revenue drops faster than the price, because operating leverage and multiple compression stack on top of each other. An exchange whose trading volumes halve doesn’t lose half its equity value; it can lose far more. As one autopsy put it, 89% is what the stack looks like.
The middle of the class tells the same story from a gentler angle. eToro, down 42%, has real revenue, but it’s cyclical retail brokerage income that compresses when retail traders leave, and retail has left. Notably, eToro is actually profitable, with Q1 2026 net income up 37% year over year, and the market still cut it nearly in half. Being profitable helped; it wasn’t a shield.
At the resilient end sit Figure and Circle. Figure operates a lending marketplace where blockchain is the technology but consumer credit is the actual product, giving it recurring revenue that survives a crypto drawdown. Circle earns interest income on the reserves backing its USDC stablecoin, a stream that keeps flowing regardless of whether trading volumes boom or bust. Both are profitable. Both held up dramatically better than the pure trading-volume plays.
The lesson writes itself: the market ruthlessly separated companies with recurring or contracted revenue from those that are simply leveraged bets on crypto sentiment. Sticky revenue survived. Sentiment-dependent revenue got crushed.
Two Things Deflated at Once
Understanding the severity requires seeing that two separate bubbles popped simultaneously.
The first was the crypto cycle itself. These companies listed at valuations that treated the 2025 bull-market peak as a baseline rather than a top. Gemini’s debut, for instance, came in the exact month the broader market topped, built on a $2.2 billion-plus valuation resting on exchange volumes that were already eroding. When Bitcoin fell from its $126,000 October 2025 peak to the low $60,000s, the revenue assumptions baked into those valuations collapsed with it.
The second was the “crypto premium” itself. For a while, public investors paid extra simply to own the crypto story. As sentiment cooled, that premium evaporated. Stocks priced for perfection met a market that was anything but, and the multiple compression stacked on top of the revenue decline. Two deflations, hitting the same stocks at the same time.
Then a mechanical force turned bad debuts into relentless declines: the lockup expiry. Standard listing agreements bar insiders from selling for roughly six months. Every company in this class carried a scheduled supply cliff into its first winter, insiders finally free to sell into stocks that were already halving. It’s the equity-market version of a token vesting unlock, and it behaves identically. The market marks the stock down ahead of the expiry, then absorbs whatever insiders actually dump, which for holders already down 60-80% was frequently everything liquid. Weak stocks into expiries beget selling that begets weaker stocks into the next expiry. The reflexivity is vicious.
What It Froze
The damage extends well beyond the six companies that listed. The prices have frozen the entire pipeline behind them.
The class of 2025 was supposed to be the opening act for the most credentialed lineup in the industry’s history. Kraken, Grayscale, Consensys, and Ledger all had bankers engaged and filings drafted. Now they’re all waiting. Kraken’s parent, Payward, paused its listing in March 2026. Grayscale delayed and is unlikely to restart before the fourth quarter. Consensys and Ledger have postponed their plans. The list of firms actively delaying US crypto listings is now longer than the list actively pursuing them.
The window will reopen eventually, but on different terms. The next successful crypto IPO will likely need to look more like Circle or Figure than like Gemini: a business with recurring, contracted, or interest-based revenue that can survive a multi-year drawdown, not one whose fortunes swing with daily trading volumes. The GENIUS Act’s stablecoin framework and clearer US regulation may help, but the market has made its preference explicit.
The Takeaway
For investors, the crypto IPO class of 2025 is one of the cleanest natural experiments the industry has produced. It tested a simple question: can crypto companies sustain public valuations when disconnected from a bull market? The answer, at best, is mixed, and it depends entirely on the business model.
The unglamorous questions turned out to be the only ones that mattered. Is the company profitable? Is its revenue tied to Bitcoin’s daily price action, or does it come from a recurring source that survives a two-year winter? What does the lockup schedule look like, and how much insider selling has already flowed through? The companies that got these answers right, Circle and Figure, are roughly flat. The ones that got them wrong are down 70-89%.
There’s a broader message here that applies far beyond anyone eyeing an IPO. Whether you’re building an exchange, a media outlet, or an infrastructure provider, the market has spoken clearly: substance, real revenue, and credibility beat hype, especially when conditions cool. Listing is easy at the top and brutal on the way down. The crypto class of 2025 learned that the expensive way, and the companies still waiting in the pipeline are taking notes.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making any investment decisions.
