The hottest IPO of 2026 isn't a crypto exchange. It's a chip company most retail investors had never heard of two years ago.
Cerebras Systems just priced its IPO at $185 a share, well above the original $115-to-$125 range, raising about $5.5 billion at a $56 billion fully diluted valuation. Two weeks earlier, Kraken pulled its own IPO off the calendar, and a few days later, hardware wallet maker Ledger did the same.
That's the same investor pool, choosing very different sides of the trade.
Where the money is actually going
AI infrastructure is now the bet Wall Street wants to fund. Cerebras builds wafer-scale processors, chips that use an entire silicon wafer instead of being cut into smaller pieces, and pitches itself as the alternative to Nvidia's near-monopoly on AI compute.
The architecture is built for inference, the part of AI where a trained model actually generates answers, rather than training, where a model first learns.
The pricing power on the IPO tells you how much demand there was, and OpenAI and SpaceX are widely expected to follow with public listings of their own.
Each of those listings is going to pull more capital toward AI infrastructure, and that includes some money that might otherwise have gone into crypto.
For a daily breakdown of where investor money is actually moving, Market Briefs covers it every morning, plus a free investing masterclass when you sign up.
The crypto IPO pipeline is going the other direction
Kraken confidentially filed for a U.S. listing in November 2025 at a roughly $20 billion valuation, with a capital raise that involved Jane Street and Citadel Securities. By March 2026, the exchange had frozen the plan and told sources it would revisit a listing when conditions improved.
In May, Ledger paused a planned U.S. IPO that had reportedly been working with Goldman Sachs, Jefferies and Barclays at a potential $4 billion valuation.
The companies that did make it out tell the same story. Circle's 2025 IPO priced at $31 a share and rallied, while Bullish followed at $37 and debuted at a roughly $5 billion market value.
Gemini, which went public later in 2025, is now trading more than 75% below its $28 IPO price after disclosing a 25% workforce reduction and a projected 2025 net loss of around $602 million. A shareholder lawsuit followed.
BitGo, the one crypto-native firm to go public in 2026, is down about 50% from its $18 IPO price.
Worth Noting
Bitcoin is down roughly 13% so far this year. When the underlying asset cools, exchange trading volume and revenue tend to cool with it.
The pitch that crypto firms can be priced like neutral infrastructure, the way Nasdaq or CME Group is priced, only works as long as the underlying asset cooperates. Right now it's not.
The investors who chose AI over crypto in this window are about to find out if they were right.
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