Weekly Recap: Circle Scores Big on IPO Fever

It was a week of fortunes made, and fortunes lost, at CoinDesk.
On the one hand, we had Circle, long a leading crypto company, hurtling to IPO and making bank. Its shares were priced at $110 at press time (up from $31 Wednesday), leading many to expect a summer and fall of crypto-themed IPOs. On the other, we saw HyperLiquid trader James Wynn go from having a $100 million BTC position one day to a massive loss the next. (Kids, beware the big, bad leverage monster).
Most of the market portents looked good, though. Crypto money-raising season was in full swing.
Groups doubled-down on the Bitcoin Treasury Strategy, not least Metaplanet, Japan’s answer to Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Pump.Fun, Solana’s memecoin juggernaut, said it was lining up $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation. One of its children, Fartcoin, surged on rumors of a Coinbase listing.

Crypto technology continued to get integrated into mainstream products. Prediction markets from Polymarket are coming to X and xAI. Uber, Apple, Airbnb and others said they were hoping to combine stablecoins into their payment offerings. Revolut said it would soon offer derivatives. And so on. Still, Trump and Musk dominated coverage as normal (probably to an unhealthy degree). On Thursday, Trump’s media company Truth Social said it would launch its own Bitcoin ETF. (By Friday, it was set to issue more shares as well.)

The Trump-Musk feud, which also broke this week, highlighted the U.S.’s precarious debt situation (a key driver for bitcoin’s existence). But so far bitcoin, and dogecoin, prices are down on the news. Really anything is possible in the weeks ahead.