Bullish shares jumped 84% from the IPO price after the digital-asset exchange operator and owner of media outlet CoinDesk raised $1.1 billion in an initial public offering.
Shares of the Cayman Islands-based company closed at $68 each on Wednesday in New York, nearly doubling its IPO price of $37 apiece. The offering was upsized earlier in the week to 30 million shares, and the price range was increased.
The trading gives Bullish a market value of $9.9 billion based on the outstanding shares listed in its filing. The IPO ended more than 20 times oversubscribed, with about a third of orders receiving no shares at all, people familiar with the matter have said.
Bullish, which counts former New York Stock Exchange president Tom Farley as its Chief Executive Officer, offers crypto spot trading, margin trading and derivatives trading, with a focus on institutional investors, the filings show. Its margin and derivatives products aren’t currently available in the US or to US users.
The offering comes as more crypto companies have been choosing to go public through IPOs, blank-check mergers or reverse takeovers as the Trump administration has embraced the industry and crypto legislation has moved through Congress. Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. saw its stock rise as much as 750% above the IPO price in the first month following its $1.2 billion first-time share sale in June.
Standing Out in Crypto
As public equity markets increasingly become a vehicle for crypto-sector fundraising, companies like Bullish that offer exposure to the emerging industry’s plumbing are under pressure to differentiate themselves.
“Our belief is that in crypto, and in particular in institutional crypto, credibility matters a lot — and a lot more than in other financial markets,” Farley told Bloomberg News in an interview. “Being a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange gives you additional credibility that you would not otherwise have.”
Although Bullish held crypto including $1.7 billion of Bitcoin as of March 31, the filing showed, Farley was keen to differentiate the company from others like Strategy Inc. that explicitly seeks to tie its fortunes to Bitcoin’s appreciation.
“In a manner of speaking we are a Bitcoin treasury company but we are not a Bitcoin treasury company as it is defined today,” Farley said. “We don’t intend for our Bitcoin balance to grow, we will not raise converts, we will not raise debt for the express purpose of going and buying Bitcoin. But we are open to all financing alternatives.”
The company may benefit from other tailwinds, such as stablecoin legislation being signed into law — Bullish offers liquidity services for stablecoin issuers. It also bought CoinDesk, which provides market data and indexes in addition to its media operations, in 2023 from Digital Currency Group for $72.6 million.
Bullish previously announced in 2021 that it planned to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, in a deal that would have valued the combined firm at about $9 billion. The merger was scrapped in 2022.
The company’s biggest investors include its co-founder, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer, who is expected to own 30.1% of the shares following the offering. Bullish board member Kokuei Yuan is set to have 26.7% of the shares, according to the filing.
BlackRock Inc. and ARK Investment Management were separately interested in buying as much as $200 million of shares in aggregate at the IPO price, according to the filing.
The company had a net loss of about $348.6 million on digital-asset sales of $80.2 million in the three months ending March 31, compared with net income of $104.8 million on $80.4 million of sales in the same period a year earlier, according to the filing.
The firm was formerly a subsidiary of Block.one, which reduced its shareholding in the company below 50% in July 2024, the filing shows.
The offering was led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., Jefferies Financial Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. Bullish trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BLSH.
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: To learn more about this and other topics, check out some of our webcasts.
Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit
bloomberg.com.
Read more articles by Monique Mulima, Bailey Lipschultz, Anthony Hughes
