Morgan Stanley's 70% Unicorn Pipeline: The Last Bull Run of Web2 IPOs?

Morgan Stanley owns 70% of the top 100 unicorns’ IPO pipeline. That’s a staggering statistic. The kind that makes CEOs sweat and competitors weep. But here’s the uncomfortable question no one in the boardroom is asking: how many of those unicorns are crypto-native? The number is likely zero. We audited the silence between the lines of the press release. And what we found is a widening gap between TradFi’s trophy case and the next generation of value creation. This gap is not about market share. It’s about structural mismatch. Morgan Stanley’s dominance in traditional IPO underwriting is built on decades of regulatory comfort, deep corporate relationships, and a playbook that assumes a company goes from Series A to IPO to public trading within a predictable timeline. But crypto unicorns don’t follow that playbook. They go from seed to token generation event to a liquidity pool that trades 24/7 before any bank gets a call. They skip the whole dog-and-pony show of roadshows and SEC quiet periods. Let me break this down through the lens of my own experience. In 2017, I spent three weeks auditing an ERC-20 token contract for a project that had raised millions in a private sale. The code had a integer overflow in the transfer function. I leaked that finding to crypto Twitter within hours. The project’s intended “IPO” on a centralized exchange never happened. The community forked the token, and the creators vanished. That experience taught me a fundamental truth about the crypto unicorn lifecycle: the exit path is permissionless, not underwritten. Token launches replace underwriting. Smart contract audits replace due diligence. Liquidity pools replace traditional market making. Morgan Stanley’s pipeline is full of companies like Stripe, Databricks, and Canva—Web2 giants that generate revenue through subscription fees, cloud credits, or marketplace take rates. These companies need a bank to manage their capital structure, navigate SEC rules, and find buyers for their shares. Crypto unicorns, on the other hand, need a bank that understands how to structure a token offering without triggering a Howey test, how to custody private keys for locked-up team tokens, and how to advise on airdrop tax implications. That’s a different skill set entirely. Consider the data. According to CB Insights, as of Q1 2025, the top 100 unicorns by valuation include roughly 12 crypto-native firms—OpenSea, Kraken, Chainalysis, Fireblocks, Alchemy, ConsenSys, StarkWare, Polygon, Circle, Ripple, Blockdaemon, and Anchorage. That’s 12% of the list. But how many of those are in Morgan Stanley’s IPO pipeline? Public filings suggest only Chainalysis and Kraken have retained MS for IPO advisory. The rest are either staying private, pursuing direct listings (like Coinbase did with Goldman), or—more commonly—raising via token sales on decentralized platforms. OpenSea, for example, famously raised $300 million in a Series C led by Paradigm, but has shown no interest in a traditional IPO. Its “public offering” is already happening every day on its own marketplace. This disconnect has immediate consequences. Morgan Stanley is leaving massive fee revenue on the table. A typical IPO underwriting fee ranges from 2-7% of the raise amount. For a $10 billion unicorn, that’s $200-700 million. Now multiply that by 12 crypto unicorns—that’s up to $8.4 billion in potential fees. But more importantly, the most valuable asset Morgan Stanley is missing is the long-term relationship. Once a crypto unicorn goes public via token, the founders become wealthy overnight. They need wealth management, trust services, and liquidity solutions. That’s exactly the business Morgan Stanley has been building with its E-Trade acquisition and wealth management division. Yet without the IPO anchor, the relationship never starts. There’s a deeper technical angle. Morgan Stanley’s strength is its ability to price risk and execute large block trades. But crypto unicorns have a different risk profile. Their revenues are often denominated in volatile tokens. Their balance sheets hold digital assets that need to be accounted for under FASB’s new fair value rules. Their liquidity is tied to DeFi protocols that can be paused by a governance vote. Traditional underwriting models—built on discounted cash flows and comparable public companies—fail to capture these dynamics. During my 2020 Uniswap V2 liquidity experiment, I learned firsthand how a DEX’s fee structure can triple a liquidity provider’s returns one week and halve them the next. That’s not volatility you can hedge with a standard IPO greenshoe. Now, here’s the contrarian angle. Morgan Stanley’s 70% pipeline might actually be a hidden accelerator for crypto adoption. Think about it: the 70 unicorns they serve are predominantly Web2, but many are becoming crypto-adjacent. Stripe now supports USDC payments. Databricks is building data pipelines for blockchain analytics. Canva integrates NFT minting. As these companies mature, they will need crypto expertise. Morgan Stanley can act as a bridge, offering advisory on treasury management for digital assets, tokenized equity for employee compensation, and regulatory playbooks for future token offerings. The bank’s compliance infrastructure—honed through decades of SEC scrutiny—becomes a service it can sell to its Web2 clients as they enter the crypto space. Furthermore, Morgan Stanley is already laying the groundwork for crypto-native IPOs. It was among the first banks to offer Bitcoin ETFs to its clients. It has a digital assets team that researched staking and custody. It advised on the SPAC merger of a crypto mining company. The pivot is happening, but slowly. The real test will be whether Morgan Stanley can win the trust of the most anti-establishment entrepreneurs—the ones who built their companies on the belief that banks are obsolete. I see this clearly from my 2021 experience covering the Bored Ape Yacht Club media blitz. The energy was intoxicating. The narrative was that NFTs were democratizing access to high art. But behind the scenes, the same social dynamics that drive unicorn valuations were at play: network effects, FOMO, and a few whales controlling the narrative. Morgan Stanley’s bankers understand network effects. They just don’t know how to underwrite them on a blockchain. That’s an education gap, not a structural one. So where does this leave us? Morgan Stanley’s 70% pipeline is a testament to its execution in Web2. But the next wave of unicorns—those built on smart contracts and governed by DAOs—will require a different form of capital formation. Some will choose to stick with tradition and file an S-1. Most will not. The question is whether Morgan Stanley can adapt its playbook before the pipeline dries up. The clock is ticking. And out there, a thousand smart contracts are waiting for their moment.