The money is back. The multiples are not.
Kalshi is chasing a $40 billion valuation, Blockchain.com is lining up an IPO, and crypto is throwing its best suit back on for Wall Street — but the premium era that made crypto treasury stocks feel like lottery tickets is quietly dying.
For context: during the 2021 bull run, crypto-adjacent companies commanded valuations that made zero fundamental sense. Investors paid eye-watering premiums just to get indirect Bitcoin exposure through public equities. It was irrational, it was fun, and it minted millionaires. That trade is no longer the trade.
The Kalshi Number Everyone Is Obsessing Over
Kalshi's reported $40 billion target is the kind of number that stops a room. The prediction market platform rode a landmark regulatory win — the right to offer event contracts on U.S. elections — straight into a valuation conversation that most fintech companies spend a decade trying to have. At $40B, Kalshi would sit alongside some of the most valuable private fintech companies on the planet.
But here's the friction: that valuation assumes the market will pay a premium for what Kalshi represents, not just what it earns today. In 2021, that assumption was free money. In 2025, investors are asking harder questions.
Blockchain.com Wants In Before the Window Closes
Blockchain.com's IPO push is a calculated read on market timing. Crypto sentiment is up, institutional flows are real, and the regulatory fog in the U.S. is finally lifting. If you're going to go public as a crypto-native company, now is a more defensible moment than most of the last three years.
But the broader signal from crypto treasury companies tells a more complicated story. Firms that stacked Bitcoin on their balance sheets and watched their stock trade at massive premiums to net asset value are seeing that gap compress. The arbitrage that made strategy-style treasury plays so explosive is normalizing. Investors are no longer paying a 2x or 3x premium just to hold crypto exposure through a public wrapper.
What This Actually Means for Crypto Holders
The compression of premiums is not a bear signal — it is a maturity signal. Capital is coming back into crypto, but it is getting smarter and more selective about where it lands.
Watch the Blockchain.com IPO filing closely when it drops. The valuation it achieves and the institutional demand it attracts will be one of the clearest real-time reads on how Wall Street is actually pricing crypto infrastructure in 2025, not how it priced hype in 2021.
If the premium is gone but the capital is still arriving, the next winners will not be the companies with the biggest Bitcoin stash. They will be the companies with the most defensible revenue. Position accordingly.