Bullish

On May 11, 2021, Block.one announced the formation of a new subsidiary, Bullish Global, to be operated as an independent entity, with plans to launch the Bullish cryptocurrency exchange in 2021 combining central limit order book technology with a DeFi market architecture. Bullish Global was capitalized with more than $10 billion in cash and digital assets: Block.one injected $100 million in cash, 164,000 BTCBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry and 20 million EOS, and an additional $300 million strategic investment round was completed. Investors included Thiel CapitalThiel CapitalThiel Capital is an American investment firm founded by Peter Thiel in 2011 that provides strategic and operational support for his investment initiatives and entrepreneurial ventures; Founders Fund, Mithril, Valar Ventures, the Thiel Fellowship, and Breakout Labs were all incubated by the firm or its predecessors. It also invests in startups in its own name, partnered with Pacific Century to sponsor the Bridgetown series of special purpose acquisition companies, and took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round in 2021.Open the full entry, Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry, Alan HowardAlan HowardAlan Howard is a British macro hedge fund manager who in 2002 co-founded Brevan Howard with fellow traders from Credit Suisse First Boston and built it into one of Europe’s largest hedge fund managers. After stepping down as chief executive in 2019, he focused on his own trading, and in 2021 he took part in Bullish’s strategic funding round and became a senior advisor to the company.Open the full entry, Louis BaconLouis BaconLouis Bacon is an American macro hedge fund manager and conservation philanthropist who founded Moore Capital Management in 1989 and serves as its chairman and principal investment manager. He founded The Moore Charitable Foundation in 1992 and donated the largest conservation easement the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ever received. In 2021, he took part in Bullish’s $300 million strategic funding round.Open the full entry, Richard LiRichard LiRichard Li (Li Tzar Kai) is a Hong Kong entrepreneur and investor. He founded the pan-Asian satellite television network Star TV in the early 1990s and, after selling a controlling stake to News Corporation in 1993, founded the private investment group Pacific Century Group (PCG). He has been chairman of PCCW since 1999 and is executive chairman of HKT; the insurer FWD, which he founded in 2013, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2025.Open the full entry, Christian AngermayerChristian AngermayerChristian Angermayer is a German entrepreneur and investor and the founder of Apeiron Investment Group, a private investment firm and family office. He co-founded the RNA interference company Ribopharma in 2000 and, in 2018, co-founded atai Life Sciences, a biotechnology company developing mental health treatments including psychedelic compounds (AtaiBeckley after its 2025 combination with Beckley Psytech), where he is chairman of the board; he is also co-founder and chairman of the board of Enhanced, a sports competition and wellness company.Open the full entry, Galaxy DigitalGalaxy DigitalGalaxy Digital (Galaxy Digital Inc., Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange: GLXY) is a New York-based digital asset financial services and data center infrastructure company founded by Mike Novogratz, which says it was founded in 2018. It provides institutional clients with digital asset trading, lending, investment banking, asset management, staking, and custody technology services, and is building data centers in Texas for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.Open the full entry and Nomura; Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, Alan Howard, Richard Li and Christian Angermayer also became senior advisors to the company. The announcement said Bullish would use EOSIO and the EOS public blockchain to generate a cryptographically verifiable audit trail for all transactions. These were the plans stated at the time and do not mean that all features were implemented.⁠[1]

In November 2021, Bullish Exchange officially went live. According to Bullish’s official disclosures, the exchange’s cumulative trading volume has exceeded $300 billion and its BTC and ETHEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry spot trading volumes rank among the top three globally. The exchange uses proprietary automated market making (AMM) technology, is regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC), is audited by DeloitteDeloitteDeloitte is a global professional services network made up of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms, providing audit and assurance, consulting, tax and legal services. It reported aggregate revenue of $74.5 billion for fiscal 2026 and has nearly 500,000 people.Open the full entry, and operates on a full-reserve model, holding client assets 1:1 and segregated from company assets.⁠[2]

On November 20, 2023, Bullish Global announced the acquisition of CoinDesk (a combined media, events and indices platform) from Digital Currency GroupDigital Currency GroupDigital Currency Group (DCG) is a crypto asset investment and holding company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, founded by Barry Silbert in 2015. It invests in blockchain startups with permanent capital and owns subsidiaries including the digital asset manager Grayscale. In 2022, its crypto lender Genesis suffered losses after major client Three Arrows Capital defaulted and filed for bankruptcy the following year, leaving DCG and Silbert facing a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General, an SEC penalty, and multiple civil suits.Open the full entry (DCG). CoinDesk continued to be led by then-CEO Kevin Worth and the existing management team, operating as an independent subsidiary within the Bullish Group; the terms of the transaction were not disclosed. To safeguard editorial independence, CoinDesk also appointed former Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry editor-in-chief Matt Murray as chair of its editorial committee. The announcement said Bullish Exchange had recorded more than $300 billion in cumulative trading volume since its launch in November 2021 (as disclosed by the company), and that it was then regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) and used proprietary automated market making (AMM) technology. Purchase prices circulated by third parties do not appear in the official announcement and are not used.⁠[2]

On August 14, 2025, Bullish announced the closing of its initial public offering: it issued 30,000,000 ordinary shares at $37.00 per share, for aggregate gross proceeds of about $1.0345 billion. The shares began trading on the NYSE on August 13, 2025, under the ticker BLSH; the underwriters received a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4.5 million shares. J.P. Morgan and Jefferies acted as joint lead bookrunners, CitigroupCitigroupCitigroup Inc. is a global diversified financial services holding company based in New York, with a history dating back to 1812.Open the full entry as joint bookrunner, and Cantor, Deutsche Bank Securities and Societe Generale as other bookrunners. The related registration statement was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry (SEC) and became effective on August 12, 2025. The company is a foreign private issuer that reports to the SEC on Form 20-F annual reports and Form 6-K current reports; its principal executive offices are in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands.⁠[3][4]

On September 17, 2025, Bullish announced that Bullish US Operations LLC, the entity for its U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry digital asset trading and custody business, had been granted a BitLicense (a license for virtual currency business activity) and a money transmitter license by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The licenses allow Bullish to offer digital asset spot trading and custody services to institutions and advanced traders in New York StateNew York (state)New York is a state in the eastern United States; its capital is Albany and its largest city is New York City. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on July 26, 1788, becoming the 11th state to join the Union, and its population in the 2020 census was 20,201,249.Open the full entry. CEO Tom Farley (former president of the NYSE) and Bullish Exchange president Chris Tyrer commented in the announcement. The company’s release confirmed that it uses its investor relations website investors.bullish.com and its X account x.com/bullish to publish material information.⁠[5]

On May 5, 2026, Bullish announced an agreement to acquire Equiniti for a total transaction value of $4.2 billion: assuming $1.85 billion of Equiniti debt and paying about $2.35 billion in Bullish shares, priced at $38.48 per share based on the 30-day volume-weighted average price (VWAP) through May 4. Equiniti is a global transfer agent and shareholder services firm that maintains records for more than 2,500 companies and 20 million shareholders and processes about $500 billion in payments a year; it also disclosed nearly 3,000 issuer clients, 15,000 corporate clients and more than 5,000 employees. The two companies plan to build a full-lifecycle platform covering token design, issuance, compliance, registration and secondary trading. Siris will receive two board seats and hold a repurchase option over non-core business lines. The transaction is expected to close in early 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. The reporting outlet for this item, CoinDesk, is a Bullish subsidiary and is not independent of the acquirer.⁠[6]

On August 12, 2026, Bullish announced that several market participants had traded tokenized BLSH shares on Bullish Exchange, settled in U.S. dollar stablecoins; this was the first trading of tokenized equity on a GFSC-regulated digital asset exchange. The tokens are issuer-initiated and recorded at the shareholder register level, giving holders direct share ownership and the same legal standing as ordinary shareholders rather than synthetic positions or third-party wrappers. Groundwork for the trading: in June 2026 Bullish received a GFSC license to trade tokenized securities, and in May 2026 Bullish fully tokenized the register of its BLSH ordinary shares on SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry, becoming the first NYSE-listed company to fully tokenize its own share register. Initial participants included Wintermute, Qube Research & TechnologiesQube Research & TechnologiesQube Research & Technologies (QRT) is a London-based global multi-strategy investment manager combining data research, technology and trading execution across asset classes and regions. Its business originated at Credit Suisse and became independent in 2018.Open the full entry, Annamite, Fasanara Digital and Star Beta Technologies; trading runs 24/7 with near-instant settlement. The announcement also reiterated that the Equiniti acquisition was pending and expected to close in January 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.⁠[7]

On November 9, 2026, Bullish appointed former New York Stock Exchange president Stacey CunninghamStacey CunninghamStacey Cunningham is a financial-markets executive who led NYSE Group from 2018 to 2022 as its first female president and became president of Bullish in November 2026. A Lehigh industrial engineering graduate, her career spans trading, Nasdaq, exchange technology and market operations, private equity and corporate boards.Open the full entry as president. Her more than 30 years in financial markets included serving as NYSE Group’s first female leader and chief operating officer, as well as senior roles at NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry. Tom Farley highlighted her experience in market structure, operations and issuer relationships.⁠[8]

The appointment announcement listed her board positions at CloudflareCloudflareCloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.) is a network infrastructure and security company headquartered in San Francisco that describes itself as a connectivity cloud company. Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway, it uses its global network to provide content delivery, security and developer platform services for websites and applications, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2019 under the symbol NET.Open the full entry, NYSE and the Georgetown Psaros Center, and previous service as an operating partner at Advent International and an adviser to Uniswap Labs.⁠[8]

As of September 28, 2026, the regulatory footprint listed on Bullish’s website was: the United States (NYDFS), Hong Kong (SFC), the European Union (BaFin, MiCAR) and Gibraltar (GFSC). The website says the company is independently audited by Deloitte and operates on a full-reserve model, continuously holding client assets 1:1 and segregated from company assets. Its business lines include Bullish Exchange (a digital asset spot and derivatives exchange), CoinDesk Indices (indices), CoinDesk Data (data) and CoinDesk Insights (media and events).⁠[9][3]