Ledger, the French hardware wallet maker behind more than seven million devices and over $100 billion in client assets, put its U.S. IPO on hold this week. CoinDesk reported Tuesday that the company has not filed a draft S-1 with the SEC. Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Barclays were all hired earlier this year. The target valuation was $4 billion.
No S-1 means the process never got to the starting line. Ledger may now raise capital privately instead.
Kraken Filed With the SEC. Then Stopped.
Kraken went further than Ledger before pulling back. The exchange filed confidentially with the SEC in late 2025 and built out a derivatives and payments stack that looked like pre-IPO infrastructure. Then it paused. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said at Consensus Miami that the company is “about 80% ready” to go public, but no timeline was given.
Payward, Kraken’s parent company, is now seeking fresh funding at a $20 billion valuation instead of listing. That is a different playbook: raise private money, keep building, wait for better conditions.
BitGo Went Public. The Stock Tells the Story.
BitGo is the only crypto-native company that went through with a U.S. listing in 2026. It raised $213 million in January, priced above the marketed range at $18, and surged more than 20% on day one. That looked good.
It did not last. BitGo shares now trade 36% below their IPO price. Timing an IPO in crypto has always been brutal. An FTX stake sold for $200,000 in 2023 turned into a $3 billion miss when the market recovered. For every crypto company considering a public listing, BitGo’s 36% decline is the number sitting on the whiteboard.
The Market That Changed Between January and May
Bitcoin dropped from around $100,000 in late 2025 to roughly $75,000 by mid-April. Spot trading volumes fell 19% between February and March. Venture capital into crypto collapsed 74% from March to April. Revolut, which was eyeing a $200 billion IPO valuation just five months after closing a $75 billion round, had its own problems when a glitch briefly showed Bitcoin at $0.02 for 68 million users. That kind of instability does not help the IPO pitch.
Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier told Bloomberg earlier this year that “money is in New York today for crypto, nowhere else in the world.” He hired a former Circle executive as CFO, opened a New York office, and built out the Ledger Enterprise institutional platform. All the moves pointed toward a listing. The market did not cooperate.
Gauthier also said his job was to “prepare the company for all eventualities” and that Ledger could remain private “forever.” That language is what CEOs use when the IPO window closes but the cameras are still on.
Two of crypto’s most valuable private companies built IPO-ready infrastructure, hired Wall Street banks, expanded into New York, and then waited. The market they were waiting for did not show up. BitGo, the one that did not wait, is down 36%. The crypto IPO wave of 2026 was supposed to be a victory lap. It turned into a waiting room.
