Institutional funds are generating returns by taking equity stakes in exchanges and infrastructure companies businesses that profit from trading activity regardless of which direction prices move.
When Bitcoin moves, headlines follow. But the investors generating the most consistent returns from the crypto economy are largely indifferent to the price of any particular token. What they care about is simpler: how much trading is happening, and who is capturing the fees.
The answer, increasingly, is the exchanges. And the funds backing them at the pre-IPO stage have built positions that retail investors caught up in token speculation rarely consider.
Every trade executed on a crypto exchange generates revenue for the platform, irrespective of market direction. Volume, not price, is the operative variable. Kraken, one of the world's largest exchanges, reported revenue of $648 million in Q3 2025 alone — up 114% year-on-year — during a period when Bitcoin traded largely sideways. The company's adjusted EBITDA swung from a $6.8 million loss in the same quarter of 2024 to a $178.6 million gain.
$648M KRAKEN Q3 2025 REVENUE
+114% YEAR-ON-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH
$20B KRAKEN PRE-IPO VALUATION
+650% CIRCLE PEAK RETURN POST-IPO
Kraken raised $800 million in November 2025 at a $20 billion valuation, with participation from Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and Tribe Capital. The company has since filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, targeting a public listing in 2026. Investors in that private round acquired equity at terms unavailable to the public market.
Circle priced its IPO at $31 in June 2025. By mid-July, shares had reached $233 a return driven not by token appreciation, but by the structural dominance of USDC as a settlement layer.
The Competetive Context
Against the backdrop of crypto infrastructure investment, artificial intelligence has commanded a far larger share of global venture capital 61% of all VC deployed in 2025, per OECD data, totalling $258.7 billion. The disparity in raw dollars is significant. But a meaningful convergence is underway.
Forty cents of every venture dollar invested in crypto companies in 2025 went to firms operating at the AI-crypto intersection more than double the proportion a year earlier, according to Binance Research. Paradigm's latest $1.5 billion fund explicitly expanded its mandate to include AI and robotics.
The logic is structural: AI systems require compute at scale, creating dependency on a small number of centralised providers. Decentralised infrastructure, secured by blockchain, offers an alternative architecture that several major funds are now financing in parallel.
Access and Implications
Pre-IPO equity in crypto infrastructure is not a retail product. Participation typically requires institutional LP status in venture funds, with minimum commitments in the millions. The returns cited above accrued to a narrow class of investors.
What has changed is the secondary market. Circle (NYSE: CRCL), Gemini (Nasdaq: GEMI), Bullish (NYSE: BLSH), and Figure (Nasdaq: FIGR) all completed public listings in 2025. Kraken's anticipated 2026 IPO would extend that cohort. Public equity in these companies offers a fundamentally different exposure profile to crypto than token ownership regulated, audited, and tied to business performance rather than market sentiment.
The institutional conviction visible in pre-IPO deal flow is, at minimum, a signal worth reading carefully. When Citadel Securities takes a stake in a crypto exchange, the calculation is not speculative. It is a view that the trading infrastructure underpinning digital assets has become permanent.
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