历史上最大IPO潮即将来临，币圈的资金会被SpaceX和OpenAI吸走吗？

The US stock IPO market is reopening.

This time, the market isn't waiting for a typical wave of tech company listings, but rather a group of mega-companies capable of reshaping the scale of the global primary market: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and a batch of crypto-native companies and fintech firms.

For traditional markets, this marks the reopening of the IPO window; for the crypto space, it could represent a different form of liquidity competition.

Because today's crypto market is no longer the fully self-contained market of 2020. Stablecoins, ETFs, publicly listed mining companies, Coinbase, Circle, Kraken, Robinhood, and MicroStrategy have connected the on-chain market with the US stock market. Global risk capital is searching for returns from the same US dollar pool: they can buy BTC ETFs or AI stocks; they can buy high-FDV new tokens or "super narrative assets" like SpaceX and OpenAI.

Therefore, a core question surrounding this year's US stock IPO boom is: when more mainstream, compliant, and institutionally-friendly high-volatility assets go public en masse, will the long-term risk appetite that the crypto market relies on most be squeezed?

The US Stock IPO Window Reopens

In the first quarter of 2026, the US stock IPO market wasn't exactly hot. Renaissance Capital's Q1 review noted 35 IPOs in Q1, raising approximately $9.9 billion, with the market recovery delayed by volatility.

However, the atmosphere has noticeably warmed entering Q2. By mid-May, the pace of IPO filings and offerings in the US stock market was accelerating. Kiplinger, citing Renaissance Capital data, reported that as of May 13, 93 IPOs had been filed this year, with 57 completed offerings raising a total of approximately $20.7 billion, a year-over-year increase of 86%.

But that's not the main point.

What's truly causing the market to reprice the IPO boom is SpaceX's public IPO filing, followed by AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. Reuters reports that SpaceX aims to raise around $75 billion, at a valuation approaching $2 trillion. If materialized, it wouldn't just surpass historical IPOs like Saudi Aramco, Alibaba, and SoftBank; it could become the largest single IPO in the history of global capital markets.

If we had to describe the characteristic of this year's US stock IPO boom in a single phrase, we'd call it "the dance of the killer whales."

Dance of the Killer Whales

SpaceX's Starship

The most central player is SpaceX.

According to Reuters and various media reports, SpaceX has entered the final stage of its IPO, targeting a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion, with a potential fundraising scale of $50 billion to $75 billion. This figure is staggering in any market: Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO raised about $29.4 billion, Alibaba's 2014 US IPO raised about $25 billion, and SpaceX's target is potentially two to three times that.

SpaceX's uniqueness lies in it not being a single-business company. The market isn't buying "rocket launches," but rather a hybrid of Starlink, satellite internet, deep-space transportation, AI data centers, defense contracts, and Elon Musk's personal credibility. It's more like a super-narrative collection than a company easily explained by traditional financial models.

Second is OpenAI.

According to the WSJ and Reuters, OpenAI is preparing for a confidential IPO filing, with market expectations that its IPO valuation could reach the trillion-dollar level. OpenAI's significance isn't just ChatGPT; it's the pricing anchor for the entire AI application layer, model layer, and enterprise software gateway. Once OpenAI goes public, the US stock market will have its first true "pure AI model platform" core asset.

Third is Anthropic.

Anthropic has frequently appeared in financing and IPO rumors this year. Market reports indicate that Anthropic is discussing massive funding rounds, with valuations possibly entering the hundreds of billions or higher, and is seen as one of the AI companies that could go public as early as later this year. Compared to OpenAI, Anthropic leans more towards enterprise, compliance, safety, and large customer markets. If it lists, investors will view it as a direct comparable asset to OpenAI.

The fourth category includes mature unicorns like Databricks, Klarna, and Chime.

While not necessarily comparable to SpaceX or OpenAI in size, they represent another direction: following the valuation compression of 2022-2024, high-quality private tech companies are re-testing the public markets. Databricks represents AI data infrastructure, while Klarna and Chime are bellwethers for fintech's return to the IPO market.

The fifth category is crypto companies.

Circle completed its listing in 2025, proving the market is willing to price the stablecoin business. Kraken has also seen multiple IPO-related rumors this year, and while the pace fluctuates with the market environment, crypto company listings are no longer a fringe event. For the crypto space, this signifies a shift: narratives that originally occurred on-chain are being re-securitized by the US stock market.

The Impact of the IPO Wave on the Crypto Market

On the surface, US stock IPOs and crypto liquidity seem unrelated.

SpaceX's listing won't directly force investors to redeem USDT; OpenAI's subscription won't automatically cause on-chain TVL to decline. However, within a dollar-dominated global risk asset market, they compete for the same thing: risk budget.

Especially the most vulnerable part of the crypto market isn't BTC or ETH, but long-tail assets.

The current crypto market isn't completely devoid of money. DeFiLlama data shows the total stablecoin market cap has exceeded $320 billion, near historical highs. The problem is that this capital looks less like "long-term buying" and more like "standby funds."

CoinDesk Research's April 2026 Exchange Review shows that spot trading volume on centralized exchanges fell to approximately $1.05 trillion in April, down 14% month-over-month, the lowest since November 2023. Total spot and derivatives volume combined was approximately $4.61 trillion, declining for the fourth consecutive month. Meanwhile, the proportion of derivatives in total trading volume rose to around 77%, with open interest remaining high.

This indicates that the crypto market isn't devoid of risk appetite; rather, risk appetite is becoming "short-sighted."

Capital is willing to engage in BTC, ETH, ETF arbitrage, perpetual swaps, and short-term volatility, but unwilling to hold high-FDV new tokens long-term, unwilling to lock up funds, or pre-pay for application scenarios years down the line. In other words, the money is still in the arena, but its duration has shortened.

This is precisely where the pressure from mega US stock IPOs may come.

If the market simultaneously sees assets like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic go public this year, capital will naturally compare: when buying into future narratives, high valuations, and high volatility, why not choose more mainstream, compliant, and institutionally-allocatable AI and space assets?

For the crypto market, the impact may not manifest as an immediate drop in stablecoin market cap, but rather in three more subtle shifts:

First, Altcoin rebounds are becoming shorter and less sustainable.

Second, the ability to absorb newly listed tokens is declining, especially for projects with high FDV and low circulating supply.

Third, market attention is shifting from on-chain narratives to mega US stock IPOs, leaving only BTC, ETH, stablecoins, and a few US-stock-correlated proxy assets with liquidity in the crypto space.

This isn't a traditional "liquidity crisis," but rather a crisis more familiar to the crypto: there's money, but no one wants to take your bag.

New Nasdaq Rules Make IPOs Resemble a Black Hole

This year also brings an easily overlooked structural change: Nasdaq-100's "fast-track" inclusion mechanism.

New Nasdaq rules effective May 1, 2026, state that qualifying large newly listed companies, if their market cap ranks among the top 40 Nasdaq-100 component stocks and meets other conditions, can be included in the index as soon as 15 trading days after listing.

This means mega IPOs like SpaceX will not only attract active funds on their listing day but could also quickly trigger passive fund buying. ETFs and index funds tracking the Nasdaq-100 will need to adjust their holdings within a very short time frame.

This has two layers of impact on the market.

On one hand, it enhances the appeal of mega IPOs. Investors know that if a company is large enough, it might enter the index soon after listing, followed by passive buying pressure.

On the other hand, it can amplify short-term capital crowding. Active funds, hedge funds, retail investors, and passive ETFs will all trade the same stock around the same time window. For companies the size of SpaceX or OpenAI, this mechanism turns an IPO from a primary market event into a rebalancing event for the entire tech stock market.

This is why this year's IPO wave is more important for the crypto space: it's not just a few companies listing; the US stock market is preparing new liquidity pipelines for these companies.

Is the IPO Boom a Top Signal?

Looking solely at US stock market history, cases of a single large IPO directly triggering a systemic liquidity crisis are not typical.

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

Before 1929, the US market saw an investment trust craze, with a flood of new financial products and new stock issues absorbing retail capital, fueling the bubble alongside leverage and margin trading. It wasn't a single IPO that caused the Great Depression, but the frenzy over new stocks was part of the uncontrolled risk appetite at the time.

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

The 1999-2000 internet bubble was similar. Numerous internet companies without profits or even mature business models went public, with first-day surges becoming the norm. WilmerHale's IPO report shows 537 IPOs in the US in 1999, raising about $95.3 billion. In Q1 2000, internet-related companies accounted for 60% of IPOs. Then the Nasdaq crashed, and the IPO window quickly closed.

2021 is a more recent example. Renaissance Capital data shows 397 IPOs in the US in 2021 raised a total of $142.4 billion, one of the largest fundraising years on record; including SPACs, the frenzy was even more extreme. Rivian, Robinhood, Coinbase, and a host of software and consumer internet companies went public. But by 2022, with rising interest rates, growth stock valuation compression, and the SPAC wave receding, the new stock market quickly cooled.

This history shows that the IPO boom acts like a thermometer.

When the market is willing to assign increasingly high valuations to increasingly distant stories, when primary market assets begin to flood into the secondary market, it often signals that liquidity has entered its most risk-seeking phase. Then, once interest rates, earnings expectations, or risk appetite reverse, the IPO wave can turn from a "cash-absorbing machine" into a "top signal."

When a Bigger Gambling Table Opens

Over the past two years, the biggest change in the crypto market has been institutionalization.

BTC ETFs turned Bitcoin into an asset within US stock accounts; Circle's listing turned stablecoins into assets within the stock market; Coinbase, Robinhood, mining companies, and MicroStrategy packaged crypto beta as US stock beta. Now, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic will pull the "future tech narrative" back to the US stock market.

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

In the past, Altcoins only needed to compete with other on-chain assets for liquidity. Today, they must compete for the same pool of US dollar risk budget alongside BTC ETFs, AI stocks, space stocks, stablecoin stocks, exchange stocks, and Nasdaq-100 passive funds.

In a strong liquidity environment, this isn't a problem. US stocks rise, BTC rises, and Altcoins can also rise. But if liquidity marginally contracts, capital will first choose the deepest, most compliant, and easiest assets to exit.

This is why this year's US stock IPO boom matters for the crypto space.

It won't simply create a "liquidity crisis," but it could further change the internal capital structure of the crypto market: BTC and ETH become more like macro assets, stablecoins become cash management tools, exchanges and stablecoin companies become US stock assets, and long-tail Altcoins become increasingly dependent on short-term sentiment and niche narratives.

In the coming months, to judge the impact of this IPO wave on the crypto market, one shouldn't just look at whether the total stablecoin market cap has declined, but rather monitor several more sensitive indicators:

Can spot trading volume recover? Will the derivatives proportion remain elevated? Will BTC dominance continue to suppress Altcoins? Will the first-week absorption of new listed tokens continue to weaken? Is there real buying power when high-FDV projects have unlocks?

If these indicators continue to deteriorate, the impact of large US stock IPOs on the crypto market won't be a one-time drain, but rather a further compression of the market's capital duration.

For the crypto space, the real question isn't "will these IPOs drain all the stablecoins?" but rather: when the US stock market offers more mainstream high-volatility narratives, can on-chain long-tail assets still retain the capital willing to pay for future stories?

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