On July 19, 2025, according to CNBC, Bullish has officially submitted an IPO filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "BLSH." This is another cryptocurrency company making a move into the U.S. stock market following Circle and Coinbase.

According to the prospectus, as of the first quarter of 2025, Bullish platform's total trading volume has reached $12.5 trillion, with a daily average trading volume in the first quarter exceeding $25 billion. The Bitcoin trading volume reached $108.6 billion, a 36% year-on-year increase.

In the most profitable CEX (Centralized Exchange) track in the crypto circle, Bullish may not be a household name, but in fact, its background is quite impressive.

In 2018, EOS emerged, claiming to be the Ethereum killer. The company behind it, Block.one, rode the wave to conduct the longest and largest ICO in history, raising an astonishing $4.2 billion.

Several years later, when the EOS frenzy subsided, Block.one took a different path and launched a compliance-focused cryptocurrency exchange targeting the traditional financial market — Bullish, leading to its expulsion from the EOS community.

In July 2021, Bullish was officially launched. The initial funding included: $1 billion in cash from Block.one, 164,000 Bitcoins (then valued at about $9.7 billion), and 20 million EOS; external investors added an additional $3 billion, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, hedge fund mogul Alan Howard, and prominent figures in the crypto industry like Mike Novogratz.

In the Footsteps of Circle and Beyond Tether, Bullish Aims for Compliance

From the outset, Bullish's positioning has been clear — scale is not important, but compliance is.

Because Bullish's ultimate goal is not to make a profit in the crypto world but to become a "listed" legitimate trading platform.

Prior to its official operation, Bullish reached an agreement with a publicly traded company, Far Peak, investing $840 million to acquire a 9% stake in the company and completing a $25 billion merger to achieve a SPAC listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.

At the time, the media disclosed that Bullish was valued at $9 billion.

The former CEO of the merged company Far Peak, Thomas, is now the CEO of Bullish. He has a strong compliance background: previously serving as the COO and President of the New York Stock Exchange, where he performed exceptionally well. He has established deep connections with Wall Street titans, CEOs, and institutional investors and has extensive resources in regulation and capital.

It is worth mentioning that Far Peak did not have many external investment and acquisition projects at Bullish, but made some prominent moves in the crypto sphere, such as the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, re-staking protocol ether.fi, and the blockchain media CoinDesk.

All in all, it can be said that Bullish is a trading platform in the crypto world that aspires to become part of the "Wall Street mainstream."

However, while their aspirations are lofty, the reality is harsh. Compliance is much more challenging than they imagined.

The regulatory stance in the United States is becoming increasingly stringent. Bullish's original SPAC merger agreement was terminated in 2022, leading to the cancellation of the planned 18-month listing. Bullish also considered acquiring FTX for rapid expansion, but the deal never materialized. Bullish was forced to seek new compliance paths, such as shifting its focus to Asia and Europe.

Bullish at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference

Earlier this year, Bullish also obtained a Type 1 license (dealing in securities) and a Type 7 license (providing automated trading services) issued by the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong, as well as a virtual asset trading platform license. Additionally, Bullish has received the necessary licenses for cryptocurrency trading and custody from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority of Germany (BaFin).

Bullish has approximately 260 employees globally, with over half of them based in Hong Kong and the rest distributed across locations such as Singapore, the United States, and Gibraltar.

Another clear manifestation of Bullish's "compliance-oriented" approach is its preference for "Circle" over "Tether."

On the Bullish platform, the largest trading pairs in terms of volume are all based on USDC, not the more widely circulated and longer-established USDT. This choice reflects its unequivocal alignment with regulatory attitudes.

In recent years, as USDT has been under increasing regulatory pressure from the U.S. SEC, its market dominance has begun to waver. On the other hand, USDC, as a stablecoin launched jointly by compliant companies Circle and Coinbase, has not only successfully gone public on the U.S. stock market but has also been favored by the capital market as the "first stablecoin stock," with an excellent stock price trend. With good transparency and regulatory compliance, USDC's trading volume continues to soar.

According to the latest report published by Kaiko, in 2024, USDC's trading volume on centralized exchanges (CEX) has significantly increased, reaching $380 billion in March alone, far higher than the monthly average of $80 billion in 2023. Among them, Bullish and Bybit are the two platforms with the largest USDC trading volume, together accounting for about 60% of the market share.

The Love-Hate Relationship Between Bullish and EOS

If we were to describe the relationship between Bullish and EOS in one sentence, it would be the relationship between the ex and the current.

Although EOS's price surged by 17% after rumors of Bullish secretly submitting an IPO application surfaced, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish is not good, as Block.one abandoned EOS and then embraced Bullish.

Going back to 2017, the public blockchain race was in its golden age. Block.one introduced EOS through a whitepaper, a super blockchain project that claimed to achieve "millions of TPS and zero fees," attracting global investors in droves. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through an ICO, setting an industry record and igniting a fantasy of being the "Ethereum killer."

However, dreams started fast but also unraveled rapidly. After the EOS mainnet launched, users quickly discovered that the chain was not as "invincible" as advertised. While transactions were feeless, users needed to stake CPU and RAM, leading to a complex process and high operational barriers; node elections were not the envisioned "democratic governance" but were quickly controlled by whales and exchanges, leading to issues such as bribery and vote buying.

However, what truly accelerated EOS's decline was not just technical issues but mainly stemmed from internal resource allocation problems within Block.one.

Block.one initially promised to allocate $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but its actions were quite the opposite: it made large-scale purchases of US Treasury bonds, amassed 160,000 BTC, invested in the failed social product Voice, and used the funds for stock trading, domain purchases, among other things... Very little was actually used to support EOS developers.

At the same time, power within the company was highly centralized, with key executives mostly consisting of Block.one founder BB and his relatives and friends, forming a small-circle "family business." After 2020, BM announced his departure from the project, which also became a prelude to the complete rupture of the relationship between Block.one and EOS.

However, what truly ignited the anger within the EOS community was the emergence of Bullish.

Block.one Founder BB

In 2021, Block.one announced the launch of the crypto exchange platform Bullish and claimed to have completed a $10 billion financing round, with a prestigious list of investors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Wall Street veteran player Mike Novogratz, and other A-list capital support. This new platform focuses on compliance and stability, creating a "bridge" for institutional investors in crypto finance.

However, Bullish has almost no relation to EOS in terms of technology, branding, or even basic acknowledgment — it does not use EOS technology, does not accept EOS tokens, and does not acknowledge any association with EOS, without even the most basic expression of gratitude.

For the EOS community, this is nothing short of a public betrayal: Block.one is using the resources accumulated in building EOS to start a "new love." Meanwhile, EOS is left completely behind.

As a result, retaliation from the EOS community began.

By the end of 2021, the community initiated a "fork uprising" in an attempt to sever Block.one's control. The EOS Foundation, as a community representative, stepped in to negotiate with Block.one. However, over the course of a month, multiple proposals were discussed by both parties, but no agreement was reached. In the end, the EOS Foundation, alongside 17 nodes, revoked Block.one's power position, kicking it out of the EOS management. In 2022, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) initiated a legal action, accusing Block.one of reneging on its ecosystem commitment; by 2023, the community even considered a hard fork to completely isolate Block.one and Bullish assets.

Related Reading: "EOS Node Halts Block.one Account Release Event: The Story of the Community-Ousted Parent Company".

After the split between EOS and Block.one, the EOS community engaged in a years-long legal battle to determine ownership of the originally raised funds. However, to this day, Block.one still retains ownership and control of the funds.

So, in the eyes of many in the EOS community, Bullish is not a "new project," but more of a symbol of betrayal. The stealthily IPO-submitted Bullish has always been the "new love" that traded their ideals for reality—glamorous yet shameful.

By 2025, aiming to sever ties with the past, EOS officially rebranded to Vaulta, building Web3 banking services on its public chain. Additionally, the EOS token was renamed to A.

How Wealthy is Block.one Really?

As we all know, in its early stages, Block.one raised $4.2 billion, marking the largest funding event in crypto history. In theory, this funding could have supported long-term EOS development, aided developers, driven technological innovation, and nurtured ecosystem growth. However, when EOS ecosystem developers pleaded for support, Block.one only offered a $50,000 check—an amount insufficient to cover the salary of a Silicon Valley programmer for two months.

"Where did the $4.2 billion go?" the community questioned.

In an email from BM to Block.one shareholders on March 19, 2019, part of the answer was revealed: as of February 2019, Block.one's assets (including cash and invested funds) totaled $3 billion. Of this $3 billion, around $2.2 billion was invested in U.S. government bonds.

So where did that $4.2 billion go? Broadly speaking, in three main directions: $2.2 billion in government bonds for low-risk, stable returns to preserve wealth; 160,000 Bitcoins; and a small amount in stock trading and acquisition attempts, such as the failed Silvergate investment and Voice domain acquisition.

What many may not know is that EOS's parent company, Block.one, is currently the private company with the largest Bitcoin holdings, totaling 160,000 BTC—4,000 more than stablecoin giant Tether.

Data Source: bitcointreasuries

Based on the current price of $117,200, this 160,000 BTC is worth approximately $18.752 billion. In other words, solely from the appreciation of this Bitcoin holding, Block.one has made a profit of over $14.5 billion, roughly 4.47 times its initial ICO funding.

From a "cash is king" perspective, Block.one is very successful today, arguably even more "visionary" than MicroStrategy. It is also one of the most profitable "project parties" in crypto history. However, it did not achieve this by "building a great blockchain," but by "maximizing asset preservation, expanding holdings, and exiting smoothly."

This represents another ironic and real aspect of the crypto world: in the realm of coins, the ultimate winner is not necessarily the one with the "best technology" and the "most idealistic vision," but perhaps the one who understands compliance the best, knows how to seize the moment, and excels at preserving funds.

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