Lately, a number of funds have been discounting their positions in prized start-ups. While Square was on the road speaking with investors, it emerged that Fidelity had marked down the value of Snapchat by 25 percent. Dropbox, which provides cloud-based file storage, was devalued by BlackRock earlier this year.

From the beginning, Square has had challenges that caused it to face a trying process to go public. Its detractors have long been skeptical of the company’s business model, taking a small percentage of every credit card transaction it processes and splitting it with financial intermediaries, credit card networks and others, making it harder to achieve large-scale profitability.

It also faces a lot of competition from such traditional operators as First Data and PayPal and smaller upstarts like Stripe.

Square is also entering a difficult market for I.P.O.s in general.

Match Group, the owner of a number of dating sites including Tinder, also priced shares in its offering on Wednesday. The company sold 33.3 million shares for $12 apiece, the bottom end of the range it was marketing to investors.

The $400 million I.P.O is the first step in Match’s split from IAC/InterActiveCorp, the media conglomerate whose chairman is Barry Diller. At the I.P.O. price, Match has a market valuation of $2.9 billion.

Like Square, Match faces substantial competition, but it was able to show investors positive net income.

Many tech I.P.O.s this year, such as the software companies Box and Apigee, also priced their deals below those granted in the private markets.