Consensys, Again

After a three-year freeze, crypto companies are quietly returning to the IPO market. This shift is not speculative — it is structural. Regulation and enforcement-by-lawsuit have ceased to be existential threats. A political reset toward lighter-touch enforcement has effectively granted permission to move. As a clear signal, BitGo — a crypto custodian central to the market’s back-end infrastructure — debuted on the NYSE this week.

With the era of regulatory excess behind us, Fabrica Ventures has made a renewed investment in Consensys.

Consensys has emerged as one of the most consequential potential crypto IPOs of the next cycle, powering much of the Ethereum ecosystem. Founded in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, the company was built to deliver the software, tooling, and infrastructure needed to make blockchain networks usable at scale.

The company is best known for MetaMask, the world’s most widely used self-custody crypto wallet, with tens of millions of users worldwide. Beyond MetaMask, Consensys builds enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure, developer tooling, and compliance-focused platforms used by financial institutions and enterprises. Its portfolio includes node services, smart-contract development tools, security audits, and privacy-preserving transaction layers — core market plumbing rather than retail trading.

That distinction sits at the core of Consensys’ thesis. Rather than selling exposure to token prices, the company has positioned itself as the picks-and-shovels provider to DeFi, tokenized assets, and on-chain settlement. As regulatory scrutiny intensified between 2022 and 2024, Consensys leaned further into compliance, risk tooling, and institutional integration, aligning its product suite with frameworks familiar to traditional finance.

Consensys has completed 11 strategic acquisitions, including Web3Auth, Wallet Guard, and MyCrypto, to strengthen the MetaMask ecosystem, and has secured partnerships with major financial institutions — including JPMorgan, UBS, Mastercard, and SWIFT — for blockchain infrastructure development.

Consensys has raised $732M across multiple rounds, reaching a $7B valuation in its 2022 Series D led by ParaFi Capital, with participation from Microsoft, SoftBank, and Temasek. The company’s ability to attract both crypto-native investors and traditional financial institutions such as JPMorgan, UBS, and Mastercard underscores a crossover appeal that should translate well in the public markets.

Conclusion

Consensys has selected JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as underwriters for its planned 2026 IPO. In our view, the company is well positioned to emerge as the largest public crypto-infrastructure franchise.