Everyone keeps waiting for the next Circle. There might not be another one, and that's perfectly fine.

Circle proved the IPO can work(at first). It priced at $31 in June 2025, gained 168% by day one's close, and made Jeremy Allaire a billionaire before the bell rang. Every founder in the space pointed at the ticker and called it the blueprint. 

Nine months later, Architect Partners tracked the average crypto stock down 25% for the quarter. Circle was the outlier, up 13%. Butfast forward to present day, Circle is down ~65% from its IPO price.

The other four companies that IPO'd that year, eToro, Bullish, Figure, and Gemini, are all trading below their highs.

Stablecoin infrastructure holds up fine as a business. It just makes a weak IPO candidate. This is okay because they’re ripe for M&A.

Going public means one liquidity event, priced on one day, with a lockup that traps employees and early investors for months while the market decides how it feels about crypto that week. A stablecoin company can prove it built something worth paying for without that exposure.

These exits already happened, and at real size. Funding rounds still steal the spotlight, which never made sense to me. Here's a few of them.

Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge, a company that had raised $58 million total. That's roughly 19x invested capital, in cash, under three years after founding. Ripple bought Rail for $200 million, then added Hidden Road on top.

Polygon folded Coinme into Sequence for close to $250 million. Mastercard paid up to $1.8 billion for BVNK, a little over a year after BVNK had raised at a $750 million valuation. Circle itself tucked in Hashnote for $5 million, a rounding error next to its own IPO proceeds but a deal all the same.

Smaller shops move the same way. Beam, picked up by Modern Treasury in an all-stock deal last fall, cleared at a fraction of those numbers and still counted as a clean outcome.

Verda Ventures runs a live count of this at Stablescape.xyz, and the tally is blunter than any single deal: 26 confirmed exits across stablecoin infrastructure in 2025 and 2026 combined. Stripe alone owns three of them: Bridge, Privy, and Valora. Fireblocks and Polygon each picked off two more. The buyer list keeps repeating the same names.

The structures vary as much as the buyers do. Stripe paid Bridge straight cash. Mastercard structured part of BVNK's price as a performance earnout, betting on the numbers holding up instead of a fixed price today.

The buyer list used to be short, a handful of exchanges and banks. Several companies now track a third group writing checks, L1 and L2 protocols, acquiring the infrastructure that plugs users into their own chains. More buyers means more competing bids.

BVNK is the sharpest proof of that. Coinbase circled it near $2 billion before Mastercard closed at $1.8 billion instead, an actual bidding war. A founder with three interested buyers finds fair value without a roadshow. A founder with one negotiates from a weaker seat.

A public company answers to shareholders every ninety days. A stablecoin issuer already answers to state examiners and federal rules on top of that. Selling into a bank that carries that weight settles the problem outright.

CB Insights runs a Mosaic Score and an M&A Probability signal on private companies, and built a stablecoin acquisition radar around the category. Every name on it clears an above-average bar, a Mosaic score over 370 and an M&A probability above 20%. That doesn't prove M&A beats an IPO for any single company, but it shows the buyer-side homework already exists.

Woodside Capital Partners studied exit outcomes across 45,000 startups in its own report on how companies get acquired. Acquisition, over an IPO, is how most venture-backed companies leave the cap table across tech broadly. Stablecoins are following that pattern, not breaking it.

Galaxy Ventures backed Rail as a Series A investor. Mike Giampapa, the fund's general partner, has said cross-border payments move more than $190 trillion a year through infrastructure that's still outdated, and that Rail's API-first approach is what won Galaxy over. Ripple bought Rail for $200 million not long after. The fund invested for growth, and the exit that showed up was M&A.

Tracked crypto M&A grew more than 700% in 2025, that year's entire IPO class, five companies, added up to about $37 billion in combined equity value. Q1 2026 held that same M&A pace even as public crypto stocks fell. The deal market held steady while the IPO window closed.

An IPO asks a young company to survive quarterly earnings calls, activist shareholders, and headlines it can't control. Bridge skipped all of that. So did Rail, Hidden Road, Coinme, and BVNK. They got paid years earlier than a prospectus would have allowed.

Stablescape.xyz breaks its exit data out by category, and the Cross-Border B2B Payments bucket, the same one holding Bridge, BVNK, Beam, and Rail, lists five confirmed exits. Every one of them is tagged M&A. Not one is tagged IPO.

The obvious objection is upside. An IPO can make a founder a billionaire in one trading day, and getting bought rarely does that. That's true, and it's also survivorship bias talking, since only one company out of the 2025 class actually got it. Bridge's founders took a 19x return in cash, guaranteed, the week their deal closed.

But the objection that actually shapes how investors talk about these outcomes is fund math. A $500 million fund needs $1.5 billion in proceeds to return 3x. At Bridge’s reported $1.1 billion sale price, an illustrative 3.3% stake would return about $36 million, a great outcome that still covers only 2.4% of that target.

For a $40 million fund, the same position covers 30% of the $120 million needed to return 3x. Same company, same ownership, completely different significance. That’s why larger funds often have to underwrite every investment as a generational outcome. 

The data bears this out. VenCap found that only 1.1% of companies in its dataset returned the full fund that backed them. A Santé Ventures analysis found that 25% of funds below $350 million produced more than 2.5x net TVPI, compared with 17% of funds above $750 million. M&A gets called a consolation prize by investors whose fund math can’t accommodate it. That’s a statement about the fund, not the outcome.

The founders who were open towards an acquisition, instead of a roadshow, are already cashing out. The rest are waiting for a market that may only open once a cycle, and some of them will still be waiting for the next cycle too.

This category can stay healthy without every stablecoin company going public. Banks, payment networks, and L1 and L2 protocols are already paying for the ones that work, and that's happening every quarter. Stripe and Bridge, Ripple and Rail, Mastercard and BVNK, Modern Treasury and Beam, already proved it this cycle.

Every week, we turn data from Stablescape into actionable insights on where stablecoin infrastructure is growing—and which companies are shaping it.

The interactive dashboard now tracks roughly 3,500 companies across 137 countries, making it easier to spot emerging categories, overlooked markets, and the next generation of financial infrastructure.

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Disclosure: Verda Ventures may hold positions in companies named here. For informational purposes only, not investment advice.