Entering 2025, it was the year of IPOs … until it wasn’t. Firms grew timid about dipping their toes into public waters as markets sputtered amid tariff threats.

But less has turned out to be more. In fact, 2025 could end up being the year of IPOs doing well, even if some firms were hesitant to come out of their private shells. New data compiled by Bloomberg found that shares in companies to debut on US exchanges this year have climbed by a weighted average of 53% — the S&P 500 is up 4.4%, so, in the words of Larry David, pretty, pretty good. Now, to see if it inspires the wave of listings investors were hoping for.

Making a Listing, Checking It: ‘Nice’

Before the champagne-popping, the hard truth: IPOs are still down. Bloomberg counted 33 of them so far, down from 41 in the first half of 2024 (excluding SPACs and small listings that raked in under $50 million).

But the performances of stablecoin fintech Circle, up more than 585% since listing earlier this month, and cloud computing company CoreWeave, up more than 300% since listing in March, have offered assurances that, despite this year’s Olympic hurdle run of risks, investor appetite for new opportunities is resilient. There are signs in some sectors that a trickle-down effect could be on the way, although that may take time:

• On the fintech front, investment management company Wealthfront filed for an IPO earlier this week, following rival Chime’s $864 million debut in its initial public offering earlier this month. This activity suggests a warming trend in the fintech public offering market. Potential billion-dollar fintechs Klarna and Plaid have both signaled they are readying IPOs, having previously been spooked by market uncertainty.
• On the digital health front, two notable care providers have gone in opposite directions: Hinge Health is up 13.8% since its debut in May, while Omada Health has tumbled 22% since its listing earlier this month. The IPO calendar for the rest of 2025 remains relatively light, and analysts don’t expect digital health listings to pick up, but fintech and crypto firms could be inclined to file — in fact, crypto exchange Gemini filed earlier this month, with many expecting Circle’s success to embolden others in the sector to follow.

We’re Number One: The 53% average returns on newly listed US companies bested the 45% in Asia, 38% in Europe and 7% in the Middle East, according to Bloomberg’s calculations.

Nvidia has been at the heart of some dramatic market shifts this year. First, there was the DeepSeek scare: when the Chinese company released a highly successful chatbot that sent US stocks tied to AI reeling. Then, concerns about tariffs and international conflict spurred investors toward defensive positions and away from anything suggesting risk.

What does the tech giant have to show for its trouble? Reclaiming the title of most valuable public company in the world on Wednesday and seeing its shares keep rising after the re-crowning achievement.

Let the Chips Fall Where They May

The tariff temperature has gone from near-boiling to lukewarm. Same with Middle East tensions.

In the past month, Nvidia shares have surged 18%, more than the rest of the Magnificent Seven, including Microsoft, from whom it recaptured the title of world’s most valuable company on Wednesday after ceding it in March. Microsoft, which is up 10.5% in the past month, has a $3.7 trillion market cap as of Thursday, compared with Nvidia’s $3.8 trillion. The chipmaker has been helped enormously by its Magnificent 7 compatriots, which continue to pump billions into AI investments: Microsoft, Facebook-owner Meta, Google-owner Alphabet and Amazon collectively represent 40% of Nvidia’s revenue, according to supply chain data collected by Bloomberg. As if to underscore Nvidia’s comeback, Thursday saw a setback for DeepSeek:

• The Information reported Thursday that DeepSeek’s upcoming, next-generation large language model, R2, may stumble in China because of a shortage of Nvidia chips that was accelerated by the US banning exports of the company’s H20 chips.
• DeepSeek hasn’t set a release date for R2 yet, but it would face major adoption hurdles with Chinese cloud providers experiencing a prolonged hardware shortage. Relying on domestic alternatives like Huawei chips might end up stalling R2’s performance since DeepSeek’s software has been so closely tied to the H20, which was designed for the Chinese market.

Do the Golden Wave: Nvidia’s 4.3% gain Wednesday was followed by another 0.5% on Thursday, and Wall Street analysts are bullish on the stock now that risk obstacles are seemingly cleared away. Loop Capital, which hiked its target price for the company from $170 to $250, wrote in a note Wednesday that “we are entering the next ‘Golden Wave’ of Gen AI adoption and NVDA is at the front end.”

Kraken’s rising from the decentralized deep to capsize a big ship: traditional finance. The crypto platform launched a peer-to-peer payments app yesterday that lets users instantly send 300+ crypto tokens, stablecoins and fiat currencies to friends and family in more than 100 countries.

Anyone who has had to split a check with new hostel friends knows that rivals Venmo and Zelle only support payments between US users. Kraken’s app, called Krak, also doesn’t charge fees for cross-border payments or transfers from one currency to another, setting it apart from PayPal.

Kraken’s app is meant to serve as an entry point to digital assets for the crypto-cautious, with rewards of up to 10% on Krak account balances to entice new users. Krak is also part of Kraken’s push into traditional finance to diversify revenue ahead of a planned IPO.

‘Banking Sucks’

Those are the words of Kraken exec Mark Greenberg as Kraken and other crypto companies try to put their blockchain-backed spins on traditional finance:

• Kraken debuted tokens that represent US equities for non-US users, letting them trade representations of stocks like Nvidia and Tesla over the blockchain. It also bought futures-trading platform NinjaTrader this spring for $1.5 billion.
• Crypto exchange Coinbase teamed up with Shopify to launch a payments platform (creatively named Coinbase Payments) that lets merchants accept payments using the stablecoin USDC. The issuer of USDC, Circle, also introduced a cross-border payments network this spring.

At the same time, TradFi isn’t going down without a fight: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo are reportedly exploring the creation of a joint stablecoin, and brokerages like Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab are working on adding crypto trading.

Hot Coin Summer: The line between traditional and digital finance has grown blurry in the Trump era as regulatory actions against crypto companies have eased. In March, the SEC dropped a lawsuit accusing Kraken of operating an unregistered securities exchange, following the agency’s abandonment of a similar suit against rival Coinbase. Both sides of the finance world have read the new room and aren’t missing the opportunity to try to eat each other’s lunch.