The Financial Times reported that the Bullish cryptocurrency exchange has confidentially filed for an IPO. Its CEO is Tom Farley, the former President of the New York Stock Exchange, and it is backed by funds linked to Peter Thiel, alongside several billionaires. They include Alan Howard, co-founder of Brevan Howard, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon and Richard Li, the CEO of Hong Kong Telecom.
The timing of the IPO will have been influenced by last week’s hugely successful listing of stablecoin issuer Circle, which is currently trading at just shy of 3.5 times its issuance price of $31, with a market capitalization of almost $26 billion. The strong appetite for a crypto linked firm has encouraged several others to consider listings. Last week the Winklevoss twins announced that their Gemini crypto exchange had filed for a listing, also confidentially. And the Block revealed that another exchange, Uphold, is also mulling an IPO.
If Bullish proceeds, the exchange’s substantial backing positions it for a potentially massive public debut, likely to be well north of $20 billion. Its founder, Block.One, invested $9.3 billion worth of bitcoin into the exchange in May 2021. While it’s unlikely that Bullish is still sitting on the full amount, that volume of bitcoin would be worth more than $20 billion today. Block.One developed the EOSIO software that underpins the EOS blockchain. EOS perfectly timed its initial coin offering (ICO) during the 2017 bull market, raising $4 billion, a massive amount at the time. Barring geopolitical surprises, the timing could be equally good for this offering.
Beyond its exchange operations, Bullish has been expanding its crypto media presence. The exchange also owns Coindesk, which it acquired from Digital Currency Group in November 2023.
