2026 US IPO Surge: Will SpaceX and OpenAI Drain Crypto Liquidity?

The U.S. IPO market is reopening.

This time, the market is not witnessing a typical wave of tech IPOs, but rather a group of massive companies capable of rewriting the global private market landscape: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, along with a number of crypto-native and fintech companies.

For traditional markets, this is the reopening of the IPO window; for the crypto space, this could be another form of liquidity competition.

Because today’s crypto market is no longer the completely isolated market of 2020. Stablecoins, ETFs, publicly traded mining companies, Coinbase, Circle, Kraken, Robinhood, and MicroStrategy have connected the on-chain market with the U.S. stock market. Global risk capital is seeking returns within the same dollar pool: investors can buy BTC ETFs or AI stocks, high-FDV new tokens or “super-narrative assets” like SpaceX and OpenAI.

So, one central issue with this year’s U.S. stock market IPO boom is: when high-volatility assets that are more mainstream, more compliant, and easier for institutions to allocate are concentrated on public listings, will the forward-looking risk appetite most relied upon by the crypto industry be compressed?

In the first quarter of 2026, the U.S. IPO market was not particularly robust. According to Renaissance Capital’s Q1 review, 35 IPOs took place in the U.S. during the quarter, raising approximately $9.9 billion, with market recovery temporarily delayed by volatility.

However, after entering the second quarter, market sentiment clearly picked up. By mid-May, the pace of IPO filings and issuances in the U.S. stock market had accelerated. According to Renaissance Capital data cited by Kiplinger, as of May 13, 93 IPOs had been filed and 57 had completed issuance this year, raising a combined $20.7 billion—a 86% increase year-over-year.

This isn't the main point.

What truly re-priced the IPO boom was SpaceX’s public filing of its IPO documents, followed by major AI players like OpenAI and Anthropic. According to Reuters, SpaceX aims to raise approximately $75 billion, with a valuation nearing $2 trillion. If realized, it would not only surpass historic IPOs such as Saudi Aramco, Alibaba, and SoftBank, but could also become the largest single IPO in global capital market history.

If one term were to describe the hallmark of this year’s U.S. IPO boom, our editor would call it “orca dancing.”

Dancing Orca

SpaceX's Starship

The most important is SpaceX.

According to Reuters and multiple media reports, SpaceX has entered the final stages leading to its IPO, with a target valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion and a potential fundraising amount of $50 billion to $75 billion. These figures are extraordinary by any market standard: Saudi Aramco raised about $29.4 billion in its 2019 IPO, and Alibaba raised approximately $25 billion in its 2014 U.S. IPO, while SpaceX’s target could be two to three times higher than either.

What makes SpaceX unique is that it is not a single-business company. The market is not buying "rocket launches," but rather a combination of Starlink, satellite internet, deep-space transportation, AI data centers, defense contracts, and Elon Musk’s personal credibility. It resembles a super-narrative ecosystem more than a company that can be easily explained by traditional financial models.

The second is OpenAI.

According to WSJ and Reuters, OpenAI is preparing to file for a confidential IPO, with market expectations that its valuation at listing could reach the trillion-dollar level. OpenAI’s significance extends beyond ChatGPT—it serves as the pricing anchor for the entire AI application layer, model layer, and enterprise software gateway. Once OpenAI goes public, the U.S. stock market will for the first time have a truly pure-play AI model platform as a core asset.

The third is Anthropic.

Anthropic has been frequently mentioned in recent funding and IPO rumors this year. Market reports indicate that Anthropic is discussing substantial fundraising rounds, with valuations potentially reaching tens of billions of dollars or higher, and it is regarded as one of the AI companies most likely to go public as early as later this year. Compared to OpenAI, Anthropic is more focused on enterprise-grade solutions, compliance, security, and large enterprise clients. If it goes public, investors will likely view it as a direct counterpart to OpenAI.

The fourth category includes established unicorns such as Databricks, Klarna, and Chime.

These companies may not match the scale of SpaceX or OpenAI, but they represent another trend: high-quality private tech firms are retesting the public markets after the valuation compression of 2022–2024. Databricks exemplifies AI data infrastructure, while Klarna and Chime signal the return of fintech to the IPO market.

The fifth category is cryptocurrency companies.

Circle completed its listing in 2025, demonstrating that the market is willing to assign a valuation to stablecoin businesses. Kraken has also seen multiple developments related to an IPO this year; although the timeline has fluctuated due to market conditions, crypto companies going public is no longer an edge case. For the crypto industry, this signifies a shift: narratives that once occurred on-chain are now being re-securitized through U.S. equities.

The impact of the IPO wave on the crypto industry

On the surface, U.S. stock IPOs and crypto liquidity are not the same thing.

SpaceX going public won’t directly require investors to redeem USDT; OpenAI’s token sale won’t automatically cause a decline in on-chain TVL. But in a dollar-dominated global risk asset market, they are competing for the same thing: risk budget.

In particular, the most vulnerable part of the crypto market is not BTC or ETH, but rather the long-tail assets.

The current crypto market is not entirely devoid of capital. According to DeFiLlama data, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has surpassed $320 billion, nearing historical highs. The issue is that this capital increasingly resembles "ready money" rather than "long-term buying interest."

CoinDesk Research’s April 2026 Exchange Review shows that spot trading volume on centralized exchanges dropped to approximately $1.05 trillion in April, a 14% month-over-month decline and the lowest level since November 2023; total trading volume across spot and derivatives combined reached approximately $4.61 trillion, marking the fourth consecutive month of decline. However, derivatives accounted for around 77% of total trading volume, while open interest remained elevated.

This indicates that the crypto market is not without risk appetite, but rather that risk appetite is becoming more short-sighted.

Capital is willing to engage in arbitrage with BTC, ETH, and ETFs, as well as perpetual swaps and short-term volatility, but is unwilling to hold newly launched coins with high FDV for the long term, lock up funds, or pay in advance for use cases three years in the future. In other words, capital remains in the market, but its duration has shortened.

This is precisely the pressure that a massive U.S. stock market IPO could bring.

If this year the market sees assets like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic go public, capital will naturally make comparisons: if you’re buying into future narratives, high valuations, and high volatility anyway, why not invest in AI and space assets that are more mainstream, more compliant, and easier for institutions to allocate to?

For the crypto space, the impact may not manifest as an immediate decline in stablecoin market capitalization, but rather as three more subtle changes:

First, altcoin rallies are becoming shorter and less sustained.

Second, the post-listing demand has weakened, particularly for projects with high FDV and low circulating supply.

Third, market attention has shifted from on-chain narratives to U.S. stock market mega-IPOs, leaving only BTC, ETH, stablecoins, and a few assets linked to U.S. stocks with liquidity in the crypto space.

This is not a "liquidity crisis" in the traditional sense, but rather the type of crisis more familiar to the crypto world: having money, but no one is willing to take the other side of your trade.

Another easily overlooked structural change this year is Nasdaq-100’s “fast inclusion” mechanism.

New rules effective May 1, 2026, at Nasdaq state that eligible large newly listed companies may be added to the index as soon as 15 trading days after listing, provided they rank within the top 40 by market capitalization among Nasdaq-100 components and meet other criteria.

This means that mega-IPOs like SpaceX may not only attract active capital on their listing day but could also quickly trigger passive buying. ETFs and index funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 must adjust their holdings within a very short timeframe.

This also has two layers of impact on the market.

On one hand, it increases the appeal of mega IPOs, as investors know that if a company is large enough, it may quickly be added to an index after listing, attracting follow-on passive buying.

On the other hand, it also amplifies short-term capital congestion. Active funds, hedge funds, retail investors, and passive ETFs will all trade the same stock within the same time window. For companies of the caliber of SpaceX and OpenAI, this mechanism transforms the IPO from a primary market event into a rebalancing event across the entire technology stock market.

This is why this year's IPO wave is even more significant for the crypto industry: it's not just about a few companies going public, but about the U.S. stock market preparing new liquidity channels for these companies.

Is the IPO boom a top signal?

Looking solely at U.S. stock market history, it is not typical for a single large IPO to directly trigger a systemic liquidity crisis.

Conversely, another pattern emerges: IPO booms often occur near the peak of risk appetite.

Before 1929, the U.S. market experienced a surge in investment trusts, with a flood of new financial products and initial public offerings absorbing retail investor capital and, combined with leverage and margin trading, fueling a bubble. It was not a single IPO that triggered the Great Depression, but the frenzy around new stock offerings was part of the broader失控 of risk appetite at the time.

Crowds gathered on Wall Street after the stock market crash of 1929

The internet bubble of 1999–2000 was similar. A large number of internet companies with no profits, or even no established business models, went public, with massive first-day price surges becoming the norm. According to a WilmerHale IPO report, in 1999, the United States saw 537 IPOs raising approximately $95.3 billion; in the first quarter of 2000, internet-related companies accounted for 60% of all IPOs. This was followed by the Nasdaq crash and a rapid closure of the IPO window.

2021 serves as a more recent example. According to Renaissance Capital data, 397 U.S. IPOs in 2021 raised a total of $142.4 billion, making it one of the highest-raising years on record; the frenzy was even more pronounced when including SPACs. Companies like Rivian, Robinhood, and Coinbase, along with a large number of software and consumer internet firms, went public en masse. However, by 2022, rising interest rates, valuation corrections for growth stocks, and the decline of SPACs caused the new issue market to cool rapidly.

These historical accounts show that the IPO boom acts like a thermometer.

When the market is willing to assign increasingly higher valuations to more distant narratives, and when primary market assets begin to flood into the secondary market, it often signals that liquidity has entered its most risk-tolerant phase. Once interest rates, earnings expectations, or risk appetite reverse, the IPO wave can quickly shift from a “money magnet” to a “top signal.”

When the bigger table opens

The biggest change in the crypto space over the past two years has been institutionalization.

BTC ETF turns Bitcoin into an asset within U.S. stock accounts; Circle’s listing turns stablecoins into assets within the stock market; Coinbase, Robinhood, mining companies, and MicroStrategy package crypto beta as U.S. stock market beta. Now, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are bringing the “narrative of future technology” back to the U.S. stock market.

This means the competitive landscape for the crypto market has changed.

In the past, altcoins only competed for liquidity with other on-chain assets. Today, they must vie for the same pool of dollar risk budget alongside BTC ETFs, AI stocks, space stocks, stablecoin stocks, exchange platform stocks, and passive funds tracking the Nasdaq-100.

If the market is in a highly liquid environment, this is not an issue—U.S. stocks rise, BTC rises, and altcoins can rise too. But if liquidity begins to contract, capital will first flow into the deepest, most compliant, and easiest-to-exit assets.

That's why this year's U.S. stock market IPO boom is important to the crypto industry.

It won't simply create a "liquidity crisis," but it may further reshape the internal capital structure of the crypto space: BTC and ETH are becoming more like macro assets, stablecoins are functioning more like cash management tools, exchanges and stablecoin issuers are turning into U.S. equities, while long-tail altcoins are increasingly dependent on short-term sentiment and localized narratives.

In the coming months, assessing the impact of this IPO wave on the crypto industry should not rely solely on whether the total market capitalization of stablecoins has decreased, but rather on several more sensitive indicators:

Will spot trading volume recover? Will the share of derivatives remain high? Will BTC dominance continue to suppress altcoins? Will demand for new listings during their first week continue to weaken? When high-FDV projects unlock, will there be genuine buying pressure?

If these indicators continue to deteriorate, the impact of major U.S. IPOs on the crypto market will not be a one-time liquidity drain, but rather a further shortening of market funding durations.

For the crypto space, the real question isn't whether "these IPOs will drain all stablecoins," but whether on-chain long-tail assets can still retain capital willing to pay for long-term narratives, now that U.S. equities offer more mainstream high-volatility stories.

If the answer is no, then this year's IPO boom may not trigger a liquidity crisis in the U.S. stock market, but it could become a duration crisis for the crypto altcoin market.