U.S.-China AI companies rush to go public, while crypto waits for its chance in the corner

Author: Connor Dempsey

Translated and edited by: TechFlow

TechFlow Intro: Connor Dempsey is a seasoned professional in the crypto industry, having previously worked at Circle, Messari, and Coinbase Ventures. He currently leads marketing at Crossmint. In this short commentary, he puts forward a view: Under China’s “common prosperity” logic, AI companies are being pushed to go public quickly at reasonable valuations, whereas their U.S. counterparts won’t IPO until late 2026—by which time their valuations could be 100x those of Chinese peers. The AI IPO wave will continue drawing capital away from markets, pressuring crypto in the short term—but 2026 may prove an excellent year for early-stage investments.

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A wave of IPOs by Chinese AI companies is imminent—and will last 1–2 years.

Moreover, their valuations are more attractive than those of their U.S. peers.

Full disclosure: The following insights stem from a conversation I had with a longtime friend deeply familiar with the Chinese market (which remains largely opaque to me).

China’s Logic

China is building AI at the same pace as the U.S. But its control over the private sector is stronger—and its primary concern is widening wealth inequality.

The logic goes like this: AI is a winner-takes-all game. The longer companies remain private, the more wealth concentrates among a small group of founders and investors.

Chinese policy pressures high-growth AI firms to go public earlier—so ordinary investors can also share in the gains.

MiniMax (AI video generation) and Zhipu AI (China’s OpenAI) have already gone public. Moonshot (chatbot), Baichuan Intelligence (healthcare AI), and Kunlun Chip (a Baidu subsidiary) are all in the IPO queue, with valuations ranging between $2 billion and $7 billion—reasonable figures. DeepSeek stands as the sole exception, stating it will remain privately funded.

As a Westerner, I’m not taking sides—but this reasoning makes sense. U.S. AI giants won’t distribute comparable levels of wealth to the public.

The U.S. Timeline

The U.S. also faces an AI IPO wave, expected to begin in late 2026 through early 2027. OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s xAI (post-merger with SpaceX) are all likely to go public within this window.

But by the time retail investors can buy in, these companies’ valuations could be 100x those of their Chinese counterparts.

OpenAI and Anthropic will likely command trillion-dollar valuations at IPO. Databricks and xAI are already valued above $100 billion.

AI Is the Only Game in Town

No matter how things ultimately unfold, the U.S.–China AI race will accelerate full-throttle—and may drain liquidity from every other tech sector, including crypto.

Why? Because AI is the most important technology of our lifetime. If you’re a capital allocator, it’s hard to look anywhere else right now. For instance, if you have $1 million to deploy, you’ll almost certainly try to ride this AI wave.

So long as the AI IPO feast continues, crypto asset prices will likely remain under pressure.

Crypto venture funding has already noticeably slowed. A founder recently raising funds in crypto told me: “Unless you’re doing AI, most investors simply aren’t interested.”

The Silver Lining

Plummeting sentiment and investor disengagement are nothing new for crypto. After the 2018 ICO bubble burst, most retail investors remained indifferent to crypto for two full years.

Yet if you were an early investor during that period, you did exceptionally well. Solana, Compound, and Uniswap all raised seed funding then. Circle’s USDC (launched in 2018) was also built during that era.

I believe 2026 may yield a similarly promising year for those still deploying early-stage capital into crypto.

In parallel, U.S. crypto regulation is becoming increasingly clear-cut, and infrastructure development for tokenizing financial markets is underway.

Protocols like Hyperliquid are already spilling over into traditional markets—offering 24/7 crude oil futures trading even when traditional markets are closed on weekends (see Syncracy’s “The Great Perpification”).

While fewer crypto founders are launching new ventures today, interesting new companies are still emerging. Take Ryan Yi, who—drawing on four years of VC and corporate development experience at Coinbase—founded Onchain Group. It functions essentially as an investment bank built for token economies: think traditional M&A, but with tokens as assets and top crypto protocols as clients.

AI Is Crypto’s Wild Card

Although AI is sucking the air out of the room at the investment level, it will ultimately serve as rocket fuel for crypto’s utility.

Crypto has long suffered from poor user experience. Combining AI frontends with crypto backends would suddenly make using crypto as simple as using Claude or ChatGPT—ultimately becoming a mass-market on-ramp to crypto assets and protocols.

AI agents also stand to become crypto’s largest user base. Agent-to-agent commerce—millions of AI agents autonomously transacting without human involvement—is one of the strongest use cases for stablecoins and blockchains. When you need millions of agents to create wallets and transact for fractions of a cent, legacy card networks collapse. Crypto won’t.

I’m betting that the convergence of crypto and AI will be a major milestone upon maturity—and one of the most compelling phenomena to watch in the industry’s history.

~CD