Bullish IPO aims to capture OpenAI-era enthusiasm for high-risk tech

Traders in the stock market can decide next week if they feel “bullish” about Bullish, as the cryptocurrency exchange announced today it plans to raise as much as $629.3 million in its U.S. initial public offering.

The Cayman Islands-based company plans to offer 20.3 million shares for $28 to $31 each when it lists on the New York Stock Exchange. That would mean the company is valued at as much as $4.2 billion, making it the latest digital asset firm to court investors in the stock market. 

Bullish has applied for the ticker symbol “BLSH,” and the IPO is expected to price on Aug. 12. The company launched in 2021 as a spin-off of Block.one, with an initial investment of $10 billion from backers that included Peter Thiel. In 2023, Bullish acquired the crypto media brand CoinDesk. 

Crypto goes IPO

Crypto companies have been a hot spot in what’s been a pretty slow IPO market this year—and investors have been more than eager to snatch up shares. Circle Internet Group went public in June, and its shares surged nearly 750% above its IPO price in less than a month. 

And there’s already robust demand for Bullish shares: Funds and accounts managed by BlackRock and ARK Investment Management are separately interested in buying as much as $200 million of shares in aggregate at the IPO price, according to the company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Bullish offers an interesting read on how far Wall Street has come to embrace crypto assets. The company, which offers crypto spot trading, margin trading, and derivatives trading, notes in its SEC paperwork that institutional investors account for a “significant” portion of its customer base.

Tom Farley, who joined Bullish as CEO in 2023, wrote a letter in the SEC filing documenting his own introduction to digital assets, which began while he was president of the New York Stock Exchange. He recalled that his first lesson in crypto happened on a sunny summer day in 2014 while sitting on his porch with a neighbor who was enthusiastic about joining Coinbase, then a blockchain technology startup. 

Bullish banks on Trump-era momentum

The continued growth of digital assets, which Bullish says have become established as a “mainstream component of the global financial system,” will be a major driver of business growth, along with other positive trends that include greater adoption by traditional financial institutions and increasing regulatory clarity. Various steps taken by Donald Trump’s administration have helped to invigorate the crypto market, and the president is name-dropped a handful of times in the filing paperwork.

While the successful debut of Circle could bode well for Bullish, investors have already cooled on eToro, which went public in May. While eToro shares are still trading above the $52-per-share IPO price, they have fallen nearly 13% from where the stock began trading.

Of note, the SEC filing shows that Bullish reported a net loss of nearly $349 million in the three months ended March, compared with a profit of almost $105 million in  2024. And in 2022, the company scrapped an attempt to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).