An opening for U.S.-listed crypto IPOs finally appears to be taking shape. This week, crypto exchange and owner of news outlet CoinDesk, Bullish, filed its F-1 to raise up to $629 million. At the same time, Figure, which provides blockchain-based loans including crypto-backed lending, confidentially submitted its S-1. This all comes on the backdrop of IPO plans reported over the past couple of months for Grayscale, BitGo, OKX, and Gemini. In the last cycle, the public-equity window swung wide for traditional tech startups like DoorDash, Snowflake, Palantir, but yielded only one marquee digital-asset listing, Coinbase in 2021.
Earlier this year, Circle had an extremely successful IPO, seeing its initial $31 offer price soar to over $250 in the coming weeks (although it has come down to around $165 as of this writing). This IPO set a bellwether for crypto IPOs in the US. We believe Circle’s IPO success and the current market conditions for crypto set the first genuine window for operating-company (i.e., not including crypto miners) crypto IPOs in the U.S.
We do however, believe that public investors will only seek to fund crypto firms that are profitable. Circle has shown it can earn strong profits through spread income on USDC float. Bullish, by contrast, posted $302 million of GAAP net income only because it elected fair-value treatment on its $1.1 billion BTC/ETH treasury. Excluding that mark, the exchange lost about $48 million on core operations, a distinction investors will scrutinize. We expect investors to adjust for that difference, yet the deal could still clear because Bullish has lined up cornerstone interest from BlackRock and ARK Invest, two institutions that can validate liquidity and establish a valuation floor.
Figure’s story is different. The company originates and services loans on Provenance, its proprietary blockchain, and has recently expanded into crypto-secured lending. If the S-1 reveals positive net-interest margin, manageable credit losses, and a funding cost advantage from tokenized notes, we believe Figure can price alongside its crypto peer group. A clean balance-sheet narrative could also help the bankers stagger these IPO offerings, letting Figure precede Bullish so the market digests a credit model before another exchange.
We expect investor appetite to rest on a few macro factors. First, spot crypto prices must hold their recent gains, as a sharp pull-back would delay launch calendars and force underwriters to widen discounts, as it did in 2022. Second, liquid crypto instruments are thriving—spot crypto ETPs have exceeded $150 billion AUM and digital asset treasuries (DATs) clear $5 billion—demonstrating that public market investors are comfortable with crypto. Third, we expect further regulatory and legislative progress, especially on the Clarity Act, a market-structure bill that would assign jurisdictional lines between the SEC and CFTC. Passage could give large institutional investors like mutual funds, pensions, or insurers sufficient legal cover to participate in longer-tail crypto offerings.
About Kiln
Kiln is the leading staking and digital asset rewards management platform, enabling institutional customers to earn rewards on their digital assets, or to whitelabel earning functionality into their products. Kiln runs validators on all major PoS blockchains, with over $11 billion in crypto assets being programmatically staked and running over 5% of the Ethereum network on a multi-client, multi-cloud, and multi-region infrastructure. Kiln also provides a validator-agnostic suite of products for fully automated deployment of validators and reporting and commission management, enabling custodians, wallets, and exchanges to streamline staking or DeFi operations across providers. Kiln is SOC2 Type 2 certified.
