A projection that would have seemed absurd three years ago is now circulating among one of the most established investment banks on the planet.
Jefferies Financial Group analysts have estimated that a wave of crypto and blockchain public listings over the next two years could create a combined market worth $1 trillion. The drivers: institutional investor demand, maturing regulation, and the accelerating tokenization of real-world assets.
This isn't a retail prediction. It's a Wall Street call, and the infrastructure to support it is already being built.
The timing matters. Bitcoin (BTC) has held above $75,000 for most of 2026, institutional exchange-traded products are pulling in billions, and stablecoin legislation is closer to passing in the U.S. Senate than ever before.
Against that backdrop, blockchain-native companies that were once too small or too regulatory-exposed to go public are now quietly hiring underwriters and filing paperwork.
The question is no longer whether a crypto IPO supercycle is coming.
The question is which companies will define it, and who profits.
TL;DR
- Jefferies projects a $1 trillion aggregate crypto public-market cap within two years, driven by tokenization and institutional demand for blockchain-native equity.
- At least a dozen crypto-adjacent companies are in active or reported pre-IPO stages as of mid-2026, with Circle's listing the most closely watched near-term event.
- Tokenization of real-world assets is the structural engine underneath the IPO wave, with on-chain asset volumes already exceeding $15 billion and climbing.
The Jefferies Call That Changed The Conversation
On May 27, 2026, Jefferies analysts published a note arguing that institutional inflows, clearer US regulation, and the tokenization of everything from treasuries to private credit could produce a crypto public-market ecosystem worth $1 trillion in aggregate market capitalization within two years.
That estimate isn't a price target for a single asset. It's a projection for the entire cohort of blockchain-native and crypto-infrastructure companies that will reach public markets in that window.
The note marked a real shift in how major investment banks frame the sector.
Previous Jefferies crypto research focused mainly on Bitcoin price dynamics and mining economics. This projection treats blockchain infrastructure as a distinct asset class, one deserving its own IPO pipeline analysis.
The framing echoes the language used to describe the cloud computing IPO wave of 2012 to 2015, when companies like Workday, ServiceNow, and Splunk went public and collectively created hundreds of billions in market value out of a previously niche category.
Jefferies projects that crypto and blockchain public listings over the next two years could produce a combined market worth $1 trillion, representing the largest single-cohort IPO opportunity the sector has ever seen.
The bank's analysts specifically cited tokenization as the structural driver rather than speculative trading activity. That distinction is important. Prior crypto IPO cycles, including the 2021 wave that brought Coinbase public at a $65 billion valuation, were priced on trading revenue multiples. The 2026 cycle is being priced on infrastructure multiples, which are historically more durable and more attractive to generalist institutional investors.
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Why This Cycle Is Structurally Different From 2021
The 2021 Coinbase IPO was the defining event of the last crypto public-market cycle. It raised $1.6 billion in its direct listing and briefly pushed the company's market cap above $85 billion.
But within eighteen months, Coinbase's stock had fallen more than 80% from its listing-day high as trading volumes collapsed and regulatory pressure mounted.
That crash burned generalist fund managers and made the sector radioactive to many public-market allocators for nearly three years.
The 2026 cycle looks different across four measurable dimensions.
First, the regulatory environment has shifted materially. The Securities and Exchange Commission under its current leadership has moved away from the enforcement-first posture that defined 2022 and 2023, issuing clearer guidance on digital asset classification and approving spot Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) ETFs.
Second, the revenue mix of crypto-native companies has diversified. Staking services, custody, compliance infrastructure, and tokenization platforms now contribute meaningfully to revenue, reducing dependence on pure trading volume.
Third, institutional ownership of crypto assets has reached a scale where public-market crypto equity is a natural hedging and allocation tool rather than a purely speculative bet.
Fourth, the total addressable market has expanded beyond trading into settlement, custody, and asset management infrastructure.
Coinbase stock fell more than 80% from its 2021 direct-listing high within eighteen months, a collapse that kept generalist institutional capital out of crypto equity for nearly three years.
The structural difference is also visible in the type of company now preparing to go public. The 2021 wave was dominated by exchanges and miners. The 2026 pipeline includes stablecoin issuers, tokenization platforms, custody infrastructure providers, and blockchain middleware companies. These businesses carry software-like margin profiles that map more cleanly onto traditional technology valuation frameworks, making them easier for non-specialist fund managers to underwrite.
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Circle's IPO As The Bellwether For The Entire Pipeline
No single listing in the 2026 crypto IPO pipeline carries more symbolic weight than Circle Internet Financial's planned public offering.
Circle, the company behind USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market cap, filed a registration statement with the SEC in early 2026 and is widely expected to complete its listing before the end of the third quarter.
A Tiger Research report noted in late May 2026 that Circle has already pivoted its public narrative from "stablecoin issuer" to "integrated crypto infrastructure provider." That rebranding signals it is optimizing its story for generalist public-market investors rather than crypto-native ones.
Circle's revenue model depends heavily on the interest it earns on the treasury assets backing USD Coin (USDC) reserves. With US interest rates staying elevated through 2026, that model has been extraordinarily profitable.
The company reported over $1.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, a figure that puts it well within the top tier of fintech IPO candidates by scale.
At the same time, the model carries duration risk. If rates fall sharply, Circle's net interest margin compresses, and that's a risk underwriters and institutional investors are actively pricing.
Circle reported over $1.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, positioning it as one of the largest fintech IPO candidates by revenue scale in recent memory.
What makes Circle's listing a bellwether is not its size alone but its composition. USDC's on-chain circulation currently exceeds $60 billion. If Circle trades at a revenue multiple comparable to established fintech infrastructure companies, the implied market cap lands between $8 billion and $12 billion. That range would make it the second-largest crypto company ever to list on a US exchange after Coinbase, and its pricing will set the reference point for every stablecoin-adjacent and tokenization-infrastructure company that follows it to market.
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Tokenization Is The Engine Under The Hood
The Jefferies $1 trillion projection is not built on exchange trading revenue or miner economics. It is built on the tokenization of real-world assets, a process by which ownership stakes in traditional financial instruments including government bonds, private credit, real estate, and equities are represented as tokens on public or permissible blockchains. That market has grown from roughly $2 billion in total on-chain value in early 2023 to over $15 billion by May 2026, according to DefiLlama's RWA tracker, and multiple independent projections suggest it could reach $100 billion by 2030.
The companies building the middleware for this transition are the ones now drawing the most serious IPO attention.
Platforms that handle asset origination, smart-contract auditing, compliance verification, and secondary-market liquidity for tokenized instruments are accumulating the kind of recurring, fee-based revenue that public-market investors can model with relative confidence. BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, already holds over $1.7 billion in assets on-chain. When the world's largest asset manager is putting products on a public blockchain, the infrastructure companies servicing that activity become institutional-grade businesses overnight.
DefiLlama's RWA tracker shows total on-chain tokenized asset value has grown from under $2 billion in early 2023 to over $15 billion by May 2026, a more than seven-fold increase in roughly three years.
The tokenization opportunity also reshapes the competitive landscape for traditional financial infrastructure providers. Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation equivalents, custodians, and transfer agents all face potential disintermediation if settlement migrates on-chain. That threat creates a secondary IPO incentive. Crypto-native tokenization platforms have an interest in going public not just to raise capital but to establish the market credibility needed to displace incumbents in regulated markets where trust and regulatory standing matter as much as technology.
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The Regulatory Green Light That Made This Possible
The single most important external variable in determining whether the Jefferies projection materializes is US regulatory clarity, and 2026 has delivered more of it than any prior year.
The passage of the Digital Asset Market Structure Act through the House and its current Senate consideration has established a clearer framework for distinguishing securities from commodities in the digital asset context, a distinction that was previously the source of the industry's most paralyzing legal uncertainty.
The SEC's approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 and spot Ethereum ETFs later that year was the visible surface of a broader institutional recalibration inside the agency. Staff guidance issued in early 2026 clarified the conditions under which certain token distributions would not constitute securities offerings, removing the primary legal obstacle that had prevented dozens of blockchain-native companies from filing S-1 registrations. Additionally, stablecoin-specific legislation moving through the Senate would, if passed, create a federal licensing regime for stablecoin issuers, a development that directly increases Circle's regulatory certainty and valuation clarity ahead of its listing.
SEC staff guidance issued in early 2026 clarified conditions under which certain token distributions would not be treated as securities offerings, removing the primary legal barrier that had delayed dozens of crypto-native S-1 filings.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has also extended its digital asset oversight framework through new guidance covering decentralized protocols, bringing previously unregulated DeFi activity into a compliance perimeter that institutional investors can tolerate. The combined effect of SEC and CFTC action has reduced the regulatory discount that public-market investors had been applying to crypto-adjacent equity, which is a prerequisite for the kind of premium valuations that make an IPO worth pursuing in the first place.
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The Companies Most Likely To List In The Next 24 Months
Beyond Circle, a credible list of IPO candidates is taking shape. Kraken, one of the largest US-domiciled crypto exchanges, has reportedly engaged investment banks to evaluate a 2026 public listing after years of deliberation.
Anchorage Digital, the only federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, is positioned as a custody-infrastructure listing candidate with recurring institutional revenue rather than trading-dependent income. Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm, has grown its annual recurring revenue to over $500 million and counts the US government among its largest clients, giving it a revenue profile that maps cleanly onto established cybersecurity infrastructure comps.
Mining companies represent a separate and more nuanced sub-category. TeraWulf, which recently (see prior Yellow coverage) a 1-gigawatt Kentucky campus to expand its high-performance computing infrastructure, is rebranding its capital story from pure Bitcoin mining to AI-and-crypto infrastructure, a dual narrative that commands meaningfully higher valuation multiples.
Hut 8 has similarly pivoted its strategy toward AI data center landlording, using Bitcoin collateral as bridge capital. Both companies illustrate a broader trend in which crypto-native hardware operators are reframing their businesses to attract the larger pool of institutional capital chasing AI infrastructure exposure.
Chainalysis has grown its annual recurring revenue to over $500 million with the US government among its largest clients, positioning it as one of the most institutionally credible private blockchain-infrastructure companies ahead of a potential listing.
DeFi-native companies represent the most speculative end of the pipeline. Hyperliquid (HYPE), which currently (see prior Yellow coverage) approximately 70% of perpetual DEX volume, operates on a fully on-chain model that complicates traditional equity structuring.
Any pathway to public markets for a protocol of that type would likely require the creation of an equity wrapper around a foundation or treasury entity, a legal structure that has no established precedent in US securities law.
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How Tokenization Platforms Are Pricing Themselves
The valuation methodology being applied to tokenization-focused companies diverges significantly from the exchange-multiples that dominated the 2021 cycle. Investment banks are increasingly benchmarking these businesses against traditional financial data and infrastructure providers such as Broadridge Financial Solutions, SS&C Technologies, and Intercontinental Exchange.
Those companies typically trade at 20 to 35 times EBITDA, reflecting the high switching costs, regulatory moats, and recurring revenue characteristics of financial infrastructure.
A tokenization platform processing $500 million in annual transaction value with 15 to 20 basis point fee capture generates $75 million to $100 million in gross revenue. At a 25x EBITDA multiple and a 40% margin, that implies a valuation in the $750 million to $1 billion range from a relatively modest transaction volume base. The implication is that as total tokenized asset volumes scale toward the $100 billion level that Boston Consulting Group and others have projected for 2030, the companies processing those volumes could carry aggregate valuations well in excess of $50 billion even at conservative multiples.
Boston Consulting Group has projected that total tokenized asset volumes could reach $100 billion by 2030, a figure that implies aggregate infrastructure-company valuations well in excess of $50 billion at standard financial-infrastructure multiples.
The pricing discipline in this cycle also benefits from institutional investors' familiarity with infrastructure business models. In 2021, generalist fund managers struggled to assign defensible multiples to crypto exchanges because the primary revenue driver, trading volume, is highly cyclical and correlated with asset prices. Tokenization infrastructure revenue is more analogous to custody fees and transfer-agency charges, categories that portfolio managers at major pension funds and endowments have been modeling for decades. That familiarity directly reduces the risk premium applied to these businesses at IPO.
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Stablecoin Dominance And Its Role In The IPO Narrative
One data point from May 27, 2026 deserves particular attention. CoinDesk's Daybook noted that stablecoin dominance, the share of total crypto market capitalization represented by Tether (USDT) and USDC, was rising again, a pattern the outlet described as traders preferring dollars over Bitcoin. That dynamic is actually bullish for the IPO thesis in a counterintuitive way.
When stablecoin dominance rises, it typically indicates capital is rotating out of volatile assets and into dollar-denominated positions within the crypto ecosystem rather than exiting the ecosystem entirely. That behavior demonstrates the maturity of the on-chain dollar economy.
A decade ago, a risk-off rotation in crypto meant selling everything and returning to fiat through a bank wire. Today it means moving from BTC to USDC without leaving the chain. That shift represents a structural expansion of the addressable market for stablecoin issuers and custody providers, because every dollar sitting in USDC represents a fee-generating unit of on-chain dollar infrastructure.
Rising stablecoin dominance in May 2026 reflects a maturing crypto economy where risk-off rotations move capital into on-chain dollars rather than out of the ecosystem entirely, a structural tailwind for stablecoin issuers approaching IPO.
USDC's circulating supply exceeded $60 billion in May 2026, up from roughly $25 billion at the start of 2024. Tether's USDT supply stands above $110 billion. Combined, these two instruments represent more than $170 billion in on-chain dollar liquidity, a figure that rivals the money-market fund balances at some mid-sized asset managers.
The companies issuing, managing, and providing infrastructure for that dollar volume are building real financial businesses, and public markets are the natural next step for the most credible among them.
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Risks That Could Derail The $1 Trillion Projection
The Jefferies projection carries real assumptions that could fail.
The most significant risk is legislative timing. If the Senate stablecoin bill stalls or the Digital Asset Market Structure Act fails to pass before the end of the current congressional term, regulatory uncertainty reverts to a default-hostile posture that compresses IPO valuations and delays filings.
That risk is not trivial. Stablecoin legislation has been a "weeks away" story multiple times over the past three years, and the legislative calendar for the second half of 2026 is crowded.
The second risk is macroeconomic. Crypto-infrastructure IPO valuations are sensitive to broader risk appetite. If equity markets enter a correction driven by persistent inflation or a credit event, the IPO window that currently feels wide open could close rapidly. The correlation between the NASDAQ and crypto-adjacent equity is historically high during stress events, meaning that a risk-off move in traditional markets would suppress demand for new crypto listings at exactly the wrong moment.
Legislative failure or a macro-driven equity correction represent the two most credible scenarios in which the current IPO window closes before the pipeline clears, according to a pattern identified across previous technology-sector IPO cycles.
The third risk is specific to the tokenization narrative. On-chain RWA volumes of $15 billion are meaningful but small relative to the traditional markets they are meant to disrupt. If tokenization adoption stalls due to custodial liability concerns, smart-contract security failures, or resistance from incumbent financial institutions, the projected revenue base that justifies premium infrastructure valuations may not materialize on the timeline Jefferies assumes.
Security incidents in particular carry outsized reputational risk. A major exploit of a tokenized treasury fund or a stablecoin reserve management failure could set the sector back by years, as the Terra/Luna collapse did for algorithmic stablecoins in 2022.
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What The $1 Trillion Figure Actually Means For Crypto Markets
It is worth putting the $1 trillion aggregate market cap figure in context. The entire crypto market capitalization was approximately $3.3 trillion as of late May 2026, according to CoinGecko data.
A $1 trillion cohort of publicly listed blockchain-native companies would therefore represent roughly 30% of the current total crypto market cap, expressed in equity form on traditional stock exchanges rather than in token form on decentralized networks.
That overlap creates a new dynamic for portfolio construction. Large institutional investors who previously had to choose between buying crypto assets directly or gaining indirect exposure through miners and exchanges would gain access to a much broader and more differentiated equity universe. A pension fund that cannot hold BTC in its portfolio but can hold technology infrastructure equity would be able to gain meaningful exposure to the growth of on-chain finance through positions in stablecoin issuers, tokenization platforms, and blockchain middleware providers. That expansion of the eligible investor base is itself a catalyst for valuation expansion across the entire sector.
At $1 trillion in aggregate public market cap, blockchain-native equity would represent approximately 30% of the total current crypto market capitalization, dramatically expanding the eligible institutional investor base for on-chain finance exposure.
The most consequential long-term effect may be on price discovery. When a stablecoin issuer or tokenization platform trades publicly with quarterly earnings reports, analyst coverage, and disclosed reserve data, it provides real-time fundamental data that the broader crypto market currently lacks.
Public listings create price anchors, regulatory accountability, and comparative valuation benchmarks that benefit the entire asset class. If the Jefferies projection proves correct, the 2026 to 2028 crypto IPO wave will do more to legitimize digital asset markets in the eyes of mainstream investors than any single price milestone Bitcoin could achieve.
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Conclusion
The Jefferies $1 trillion crypto IPO projection is ambitious, but it is not detached from observable reality. The pipeline is real. Circle is filing. Kraken is evaluating.
Chainalysis is growing its government revenue base. TeraWulf and Hut 8 are rebranding as AI-and-crypto infrastructure landlords. Tokenized asset volumes have grown sevenfold in three years and show no signs of reversing. Regulatory clarity in the United States has advanced further in the first five months of 2026 than in the previous five years combined.
What distinguishes this cycle from the 2021 wave is structural rather than speculative. The companies entering the IPO pipeline today are building recurring-revenue businesses with margin profiles that generalist institutional investors can model and underwrite using frameworks they already understand. The valuation methodology has shifted from exchange-trading multiples to financial-infrastructure multiples, a transition that expands the eligible buyer base and reduces the speculative premium that made the 2021 vintage so vulnerable to a market downturn.
The risks are real and should be weighted honestly. Legislative delays, macro volatility, and the still-early state of tokenization adoption all represent credible scenarios in which the window narrows or closes. But the direction of travel is clearer now than at any prior point in the industry's history. If even half of the Jefferies projection materializes, the 2026 to 2028 cohort of crypto public listings will permanently reshape how institutional capital interacts with on-chain finance and how the sector is priced, regulated, and understood by mainstream markets.
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