🔔 The crypto IPO class of 2025-26 is down as much as 89%. Autopsy of a listing boom
📣 Gemini has lost 89% of its value since its September debut and is being sued by its own shareholders. BitGo is down 77%, Bullish 71%, and the pipeline behind them, Kraken, Grayscale, Consensys, Ledger, has frozen solid. The great crypto listing boom lasted about a year and destroyed most of the capital that believed in it. Here is what actually killed it, who survived and why, and what has to change before the window reopens.
➡️ For about twelve months, crypto’s arrival on public markets looked like the industry’s graduation ceremony. Circle listed. Bullish listed. Gemini priced its Nasdaq debut in September 2025 amid genuine excitement, opening at $37. Figure and BitGo followed into early 2026, and behind them assembled the most credentialed pipeline in the industry’s history: Kraken, Grayscale, Consensys, Ledger, all with bankers engaged and filings drafted. Equity, the thinking went, would do for crypto companies what ETFs had done for the coins, translate them into instruments the largest pools of capital were allowed to buy.
🌐 Ten months after Gemini’s debut, the graduation ceremony reads as a casualty list. Gemini trades at $4.19, down 89% from its opening trade, the worst performer in a class where the competition for that title is fierce: BitGo has lost 77% from its January debut at $22.43, Bullish roughly 71% from its $90 open, eToro 42%. Even the relative winners tell the story by faint praise, Figure down 14%, Circle down just 6% and thereby crowned the class valedictorian. Gemini’s collapse has now produced the sector’s first major post-IPO shareholder litigation, a suit over the company’s post-listing strategy shift, and the pipeline has not thinned but frozen: Kraken’s parent Payward paused its listing this spring, and Grayscale, Consensys, and Ledger have all postponed until conditions stabilize, which is banker language for indefinitely.
