Cryptocurrencies are courting Wall Street

Words: Prathik DesaiCompiled

by: Block unicornForeword

Tron founder Justin Sun took his blockchain empire public through a reverse merger with NASDAQ-listed toy company SRM Entertainment.

Why would a man who started his career disrupting traditional finance now line up at the gates of Wall Street with an IPO prospectus in hand?

Welcome to the big identity crisis for cryptocurrencies in 2025.

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rush to Wall Street

fever began with Circle. This month, when the stablecoin giant went public, its shares soared 168% on its first day. The offering was oversubscribed by 25 times: 850 million shares were demanded by the public, while only 34 million shares were actually issued.

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Source: TradingView

Circle currently has a market capitalization of over $33 billion, three times the $9 billion to $11 billion it reportedly made from Ripple before going public.

Circle's success has not only rewarded early investors, but has also inspired a group of crypto-native companies to consider entering Wall Street and pushed others to restart shelved IPO plans.

Three days later, Gemini filed its IPO application. Now, TRON has also announced its plans to go public.

Circle provides a template that proves that traditional markets are willing to pay a high premium for regulated cryptocurrency exposure, while mainstream investors are eager for blockchain innovations packaged in familiar corporate structures.

The public has embraced cryptocurrency products offered through traditional Wall Street channels. Since January 2024, the net inflow of Bitcoin ETFs has exceeded $45 billion.

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share price of > Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy) is several times its Bitcoin holdings: the market capitalization is about $106 billion, while its Bitcoin holdings are worth about $62 billion. Michael Saylor's Bitcoin bet has inspired more public companies to take the vault investment route.

These cases confirm the hypothesis that perhaps the quickest path to mainstream adoption is not for the world to move to self-custodial wallets and DeFi protocols. Instead, the path to mass adoption should be to make cryptocurrencies accessible directly through traditional financial infrastructure, through channels that people already trust.

Take a look at the math employed. Traditional finance touches billions of people, while there are only 560 million cryptocurrency holders worldwide.

When ETFs introduced Bitcoin to 401(k) retirement plans and pension funds, its mainstream penetration in a year surpassed the results of a decade of "not your key, not your coin".

Companies that have focused on building pure crypto products for many years are starting to focus on related products that can connect two worlds. Circle leverages stablecoins to create digital payment gateways and corporate treasury services. Coinbase has gone beyond the image of its crypto exchange by building institutional custody and prime brokerage services that rival traditional banks.

The IPO path offers something that the crypto ecosystem lacks: the use of public market capital to fund these related product lines. Need to build an enterprise-grade hosting solution? Issuance of shares. Looking to acquire a traditional fintech company? Use stocks as currency. Planning to expand to regulated lending or investment management? The credibility of the public market opens the door to crypto-native credentials that can't.

Why Trust Trumps

IdeologyThe overtures of traditional finance also address one of cryptocurrency's toughest problems: institutional trust. For years, crypto companies have struggled to bridge the credibility gap that technological innovation cannot bridge.

When Coinbase went public in 2021, institutions saw it as a risky bet on an emerging asset class. Today, Coinbase is included in the S&P 500 and manages billions of institutional assets, becoming a symbol of cryptocurrency's integration into the mainstream financial system.

This trust-building mechanism works through a variety of channels.

The SEC's regulation provides a level of compliance that is unmatched by pure crypto investments. Quarterly earnings calls and audited financial statements provide transparency not available in community governance forums. When pension fund managers are able to cite S&P ratings and decades of corporate law precedents, cryptocurrencies are no longer a blind belief, but an asset-allocation decision.

This verification is two-way.

Wall Street's embrace of crypto firms has provided legitimacy to the industry as a whole. When BlackRock aggressively builds crypto infrastructure and Fidelity provides Bitcoin services to millions of retirement accounts, it's hard to dismiss blockchain technology as a speculative bubble anymore.

In addition to the philosophical evolution, there is also a practical necessity.

After the collapse of FTX in 2023, crypto venture capital financing plummeted by 65%. When the second-largest exchange was exposed as a house of cards based on customer deposits, investors became cautious about writing checks.

Traditional venture capital, which was once generous to any business plan with the word "blockchain" in it, is rapidly drying up. Companies accustomed to investing $50 million in Series A funding rounds find that they explain basic concepts to investors without listening.

The open market remains open.

Institutional investors who are reluctant to invest in crypto startups are happy to buy shares in crypto companies that are regulated, SEC compliant, have audited financial statements, and have a clear business model.

This financing shift accelerates the strategic transition to related products.

Our view

is that the emerging strategy is to build products that solve real problems, demonstrate product-market fit through crypto-native channels, and then scale through traditional financial infrastructure.

This clash of ideas may exist, but it doesn't necessarily pose a problem.

Companies that can navigate this transformation will be able to deliver DeFi innovation that combines the reliability of traditional finance. They will provide decentralized benefits to mainstream users who will never manage their private keys or understand gas fees, including faster settlements, global accessibility, and programmable currencies.

The early promise of the crypto industry was to eliminate intermediaries altogether. But most people still want an intermediary, perhaps a better one. Faster, cheaper, more transparent, more global intermediaries than traditional banks, but still intermediaries.

Crypto companies planning to build blockchain empires may not shy away from purity beyond ideology because of the need for funds. Instead, they may focus on raising capital from the public to build the infrastructure that will bring the benefits of crypto to the next billion users.

From an adoption perspective, this trust-building mechanism seems to be working: the traditional path has accelerated crypto adoption faster than pure crypto businesses.

Finally, crypto founders who have already achieved product-market fit shouldn't be afraid to knock on Wall Street's door when the time comes. They seem eager to get you on board.