Jefferies says crypto IPOs could become a $1 trillion market. Bitcoin didn't get the memo.
A Wall Street bank just projected a $1 trillion public market for crypto companies while bitcoin trades near $74,000 and spot volumes sit at their lowest level since 2023. That gap is the actual story, and it cuts both ways.
Jefferies told institutional clients this week that it expects a surge of crypto and blockchain public listings over the next two years, and that the sector could grow into a $1 trillion public market within five years. The forecast followed the bank's first Digital Assets Investor Conference in New York, which gathered executives from 35 digital asset companies and roughly 150 institutional investors.
The conference, by the bank's own account, spent less time on bitcoin's price and more on tokenized money market funds, private credit, and settlement networks.
That framing is the headline. The number is the bait.
The bull case has detached from the token price
For most of crypto's history, the industry's fortunes moved with bitcoin. A rising token price pulled in retail, lifted exchange revenue, and justified the next funding round. A falling one did the reverse.
Jefferies is describing something different. Spot trading volumes fell 14% in April to $1.05 trillion, the lowest since November 2023. Bitcoin is under pressure. And the bank is still calling for a $1 trillion public market built on blockchain infrastructure revenue — trading fees, payments, lending, tokenized products — rather than on the price of any coin.
Either crypto has matured into an infrastructure business whose value no longer tracks speculation, or the sell-side has talked itself into a story the order book does not yet support. Both readings are defensible. Only one of them is comfortable.
Read the incentive before you read the forecast
Jefferies is an investment bank. Investment banks underwrite IPOs and earn fees on them. A bank publishing a bullish forecast about a wave of public listings is also a bank advertising the business it would like to win.
This does not make the analysis wrong. Securitize and Payward, the parent company of Kraken, are reportedly finalizing IPO plans, and 2025 already produced public debuts from Circle, Bullish, and Gemini. The pipeline is real. But a forecast and a pitch can be the same document, and a reader should weigh it accordingly.
Jefferies hedged in plain sight, noting that investors tend to overestimate tech disruption in the near term and underestimate it over the long run. That caveat is doing more work than the trillion-dollar headline.
Tokenization is the engine, and it points two directions at once
The driver behind the forecast is tokenization — representing financial assets on blockchain networks. The examples are no longer hypothetical. Securitize partnered with transfer agent Computershare to let public companies issue tokenized shares inside existing shareholder systems. Bullish agreed to acquire transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2 billion to build settlement infrastructure. The DTCC is moving tokenized assets onto a public chain.
Here is the tension nobody at the conference seems eager to name. Tokenization was sold as disintermediation — assets moving on-chain to remove the layers of custodians, clearinghouses, and transfer agents that sit between an owner and an asset. The actual rollout is doing the opposite. The custodians and transfer agents are not being removed. They are being acquired, partnered with, and tokenized in place.
Wall Street is not being disrupted by tokenization. Wall Street is buying the rails and running them.
The IPO and the token launch are converging paths
A crypto company has two ways to raise capital and distribute ownership. It can go public through the traditional machine — underwriters, a transfer agent, a listing, quarterly reporting. Or it can issue a token, distribute it on-chain, and let the market price it continuously.
For a decade these were rival philosophies. The IPO was for companies that wanted Wall Street's blessing; the token was for projects that wanted to route around it. The Jefferies forecast describes a world where the same firms do both — public equity for the company, tokenized products for the assets it manages.
That convergence raises an unglamorous question that on-chain capital formation answered years ago: how do you prove insiders cannot dump their allocation the moment a lockup is theoretically over? In equities, that is a legal promise enforced after the fact. On-chain, Team Finance makes it a contract — team tokens locked and vesting schedules enforced by code that anyone can verify, no attestation required.
The same logic runs through how new projects come to market. TrustSwap Launchpad exists because the token side of capital formation needed the same guardrails the IPO side spent a century building — vesting, distribution discipline, verifiable commitments — without waiting for an underwriter to grant them.
As the two paths converge, the on-chain side already has primitives for problems the IPO side still solves with paperwork.
What an investor should actually watch
A $1 trillion market projection five years out is, by Jefferies' own logic, almost certainly wrong in the near term and possibly right in the long term. It is not a number to trade on. It is a direction to track.
The signals that would confirm the thesis are concrete and observable. Whether Securitize and Payward actually price their offerings, and at what multiples. Whether tokenized money market funds and private credit keep moving from pilot to production. Whether the CLARITY Act, which passed the House in July 2025 but remains stalled in the Senate, finally clears and removes the legal ambiguity that has kept the most regulated institutions cautious. Jefferies described that bill as the missing piece for U.S. market structure.
If those things happen, the revenue follows, and the public market grows whether or not bitcoin recovers. If they stall, the trillion-dollar headline becomes another forecast that aged faster than the analysts hoped.
The most honest framing is the one Jefferies almost buried. The interesting question is no longer whether crypto companies will go public. It is whether the public market values them as technology companies generating real cash flows, or as a proxy for a coin price that, this week, is going the wrong way. The answer to that is worth more than a trillion-dollar estimate.