Kraken’s valuation soars to $20 billion! A new round of financing is underway to prepare for IPO next year

The valuation of U.S. crypto exchange Kraken has reached $20 billion, and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will become the underwriters behind the 2026 IPO.
(Preliminary summary: Kraken CEO stated that he will not launch an IPO for the time being: he will focus on spending resources on mergers and acquisitions, and has no intention of wasting time chasing the IPO boom)
(Background supplement: The sleeping siren awakens: Why can Kraken survive the bulls and bears and wait for an IPO? )

After U.S. President Trump returned to the White House in January this year, cryptocurrency policies have become more open, accelerating the reallocation of capital. Silicon Valley exchange Kraken is riding the wave, with its valuation jumping to $20 billion from its last round of $15 billion. Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have finalized to become joint underwriters of Kraken’s expected initial public offering (IPO) in 2026, opening a floodgate for the encryption industry to the core of Wall Street.

Valuation jumps, positive endorsement from Wall Street

Nine months ago, Kraken raised its valuation to $15 billion through a $500 million private placement. If the latest round of negotiations is successful, it will be equivalent to an increase of another 30% in market value, which also reflects the institution's optimistic judgment on the policy environment. The joining of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs symbolizes that the traditional capital market has an initial consensus on the risk model of the encryption business and is willing to endorse it with underwriting responsibilities.

In the context of the Trump administration’s plan to relax token classification and trading license regulations, compliance costs are expected to decrease, resulting in the inflow of institutional funds. Kraken’s funding terms are a direct indicator of this expectation.

Operating Physique and M&A Layout

Kraken’s revenue in the second quarter of this year reached US$411 million and EBITDA was approximately US$80 million, showing that the company relies on cash flow rather than unlimited cash-burning expansion. The $1.5 billion acquisition of trading platform NinjaTrader late last year took the business out of the single-crypto space and covered traditional futures for the first time. In addition to expanding the user base, this move also paves the way for the future launch of hybrid products such as tokenized stocks.

Kraken has recently also tested the service of splitting large technology stocks such as Apple and Tesla into on-chain tokenized transactions, gaining a first-mover position in the trend of amplifying the demand for "traditional assets on the chain".

According to an unnamed Wall Street analyst quoted by Bloomberg:

The soaring valuation of Kraken and the joining of two major investment banks have pushed cryptocurrency from the frontier into the global capital flood.

If Kraken’s IPO debuts as scheduled in 2026 and the response is enthusiastic, the boundaries between encryption and traditional finance will become even more blurred; if investors ultimately have limited interest in valuation, the entire sector will inevitably be recalibrated. Whatever the outcome, Kraken is rewriting the script on how the crypto industry interacts with Wall Street.