Encryption companies had expected a new wave of listings in 2026, but the process slowed down significantly as the market environment deteriorated. The Investment Bank Cohen & Company Capital Markets block chain and digital asset manager Christian Lopez said to CoinDesk that the main factor in slowing down the encryption IPO is not regulation, but a tightening of finance, a decrease in risk preferences and a change in financial flows.
Transfer of funds to AI
According to Lopez, after last year ' s liquidity event, funds in the ecology of digital assets were clearly withdrawn. Retail money, which was active in the encryption market, went to AI and other technology blocks and then spread to large technology units. The recent reversal of the AI Concept Unit indicates that market funds continue to rotate.
In his view, that change had directly weakened investors ' interest in newly listed encrypted shares. With increased market volatility, investors were more cautious about IPO requisitions because of their concern about the lack of secondary market succession following the new stock listing.
Many companies delayed listing.
After Circle and Bullish had completed their listings, the market was once expected to become an active year for the encryption company IPO. However, as the volume of transactions recedes, the market weakens, and some of the new shares are not on the market as expected, the heat of the distribution cools quickly.
It was reported that the Kraken parent company Payward, the Etherwood application developer Consensys, the hardware wallet provider Ledger and the regulatory company Grayscale had postponed the IPO project pending market improvement. There are also companies that are still in the process of listing: Blockchain.com in May this year indicated that an IPO application had been filed in secret with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission; CoinDesk had previously reported that the trading platform FalconX had also submitted draft S-1.
Macro-environment risk predisposition
According to Lopez, the broader macro environment is also suppressing market sentiment. Uncertainty about the future of interest rates makes investors more cautious with respect to highly volatile assets such as encryption. While some of the signals released by the Fed and the Trump government point to a more deflationary environment that may create conditions for future interest rates to decline, global markets are still affected by central bank policies and deleveraging processes.
In particular, he noted that the actions taken by the Central Bank of Japan to support the yen also reflected the continuing pressure on global liquidity. Against this background, it is more difficult for investors to believe that newly listed encryption companies can secure stable support in secondary markets.
Lopez predicts that the encryption company's listed window will probably not improve significantly until next year. He mentioned that the Bitcoin market cycle could be found at the bottom near October, and that the broader encryption market tended to follow the changes in Bitcoin's performance.
Traditional finance continues to build the chain.
Despite weak short-term financing markets, Lopez believes that the use of block-chain technology in traditional finance continues. Institutions such as Morgan Stanley, NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange are building infrastructure based on block chains and preparing for monetization.
He indicated that the industry was moving towards a faster settlement model, moving from T+1 to T+0. Meanwhile, projects such as the OpenUSD network are clustering financial institutions and payment companies around a stable currency infrastructure. Lopez expects that, in the longer term, there will be a greater chance to win by providing block-chain infrastructure, rather than a single-currency business.