The Bullish Exchange Soars on NYSE Debut With $13.2 Billion Valuation

Tom Farley, the former president of the prominent New York exchange and now the CEO of Bullish, saw his new endeavor achieve impressive results following its public listing.

The Peter Thiel-backed exchange is joining industry counterparts in a growing list of crypto corporations that are gaining access to traditional stock markets and indexes.

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The digital assets exchange Bullish rang the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) opening bell earlier this week, signaling a successful initial public offering (IPO) and its launch as a publicly traded company with the ticker BLSH.

The stock’s opening price was $90, and it reached a high of $118 before adjusting to $68, which is also the price as of press time, according to Google Finance.

The initial valuation aimed at an opening stock price of $28 to 31$, which represents a 190% increase from the highest target price, making their second attempt at going public one of the most successful IPO’s for the year. The company managed to raise $1.1 billion in the offering, compared to the initial target of $629.3 million by selling 20.3M shares.

Bullish’s notable IPO adds it to a growing list of trading companies that have gone public, with a recent example being eToro. This exchange platform joined the stock exchange in May, reaching a valuation of approximately $4.2 billion.

Only one other crypto exchange has gone public to date, and that’s Coinbase, which joined the NASDAQ with a hefty valuation of $85.8 billion in April 2021.

The conditions for this public debut were, to say the least, accommodating, with crypto-friendly legislation from the White House, growing investor and institutional confidence, and a steady stream of capital flowing towards crypto assets and various financial instruments that have surfaced from them.

Crypto Peers in The Public Space

Apart from exchanges, other crypto institutions have also listed on public exchanges, highlighting the ever-increasing adoption levels of companies in the digital assets space.

BitFuFu Inc., a Bitcoin mining company, completed a SPAC merger with Arisz Acquisition Corp. and joined the NASDAQ in March 2024, with the combination valued at $1.5 billion.

The issuer of the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, Circle, raised $1.1 billion in its IPO, which valued the company at $6.9 billion when it listed on the NYSE.