Bullish Rushes to NYSE: A Compliance Breakthrough Worth Billions and the EOS Saga

On July 19, 2025, according to CNBC, Bullish has officially filed IPO documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "BLSH". This marks another crypto company aiming for the U.S. stock market following Circle and Coinbase.

According to the prospectus, by the first quarter of 2025, Bullish's platform had accumulated a trading volume of $1.25 trillion, with a daily average trading volume exceeding $2.5 billion in the first quarter. Bitcoin trading volume reached $108.6 billion, a 36% increase year-over-year.

In the most profitable CEX track of the crypto world, Bullish is not a household name, but in fact, its "pedigree" is quite illustrious.

In 2018, EOS emerged, claiming to be the Ethereum killer. The company behind it, Block.one, capitalized on this wave to conduct the longest and highest-funded ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in history, raising a staggering $4.2 billion.

Years later, as EOS's popularity waned, Block.one "started anew", turning to create a compliant cryptocurrency trading platform targeting traditional financial markets—Bullish, and was consequently "kicked out" by the EOS community.

In July 2021, Bullish officially launched. Its initial funding included: $100 million in cash from Block.one, 164,000 Bitcoins (worth approximately $9.7 billion at the time), and 20 million EOS; external investors added another $300 million, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, hedge fund mogul Alan Howard, and well-known crypto investor Mike Novogratz.

Close to "Circle", Distant from "Tether", Bullish "Aims for Compliance"

Bullish's positioning has been clear from the start: scale is not important, but compliance is.

Because Bullish's ultimate goal is not to make profits in the crypto world, but to become a "listable" formal trading platform.

Before officially operating, Bullish reached an agreement with a listed company, Far Peak, investing $840 million to acquire 9% of the company's shares and merging with $2.5 billion to achieve a backdoor listing, lowering the traditional IPO threshold.

Media reports at the time revealed that Bullish was valued at $9 billion.

The CEO of the merged company Far Peak, Thomas, is the current CEO of Bullish, with a strong compliance background: he was previously the Chief Operating Officer and President of the New York Stock Exchange, where he performed excellently; he has established deep connections with Wall Street giants, CEOs, and institutional investors; and has extensive resources in regulation and capital.

It's worth mentioning that Farley's external investments and acquisitions at Bullish are not numerous, but they include some of the most notable in the crypto world: Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, restaking protocol ether.fi, and blockchain media CoinDesk.

In short, Bullish is the trading platform in the crypto world that most wants to become a "Wall Street regular".

But the ideal is full, the reality is bony. Compliance is harder than they imagined.

With increasingly tough U.S. regulatory attitudes, Bullish's original merger and listing agreement was terminated in 2022, and the 18-month listing plan fell through. Bullish also considered acquiring FTX for rapid expansion, but it ultimately didn't happen. Bullish was forced to find a new compliance path—such as turning to Asia and Europe.

Bullish at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference

Bullish also obtained a Type 1 license (for securities trading) and a Type 7 license (for providing automated trading services) from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission earlier this year, as well as a virtual asset trading platform license; in addition, Bullish received a license from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) for crypto asset trading and custody.

Bullish has about 260 employees worldwide, with more than half stationed in Hong Kong, and the rest distributed in Singapore, the U.S., and Gibraltar, among others.

Another obvious manifestation of Bullish's "aim for compliance" is: close to "Circle", distant from "Tether".

On the Bullish platform, the top trading pairs by volume are all USDC, not the more widely circulated and longer-established USDT. Behind this reflects its clear stance on regulatory attitudes.

According to the latest report released by Kaiko, in 2024, USDC's trading volume on centralized exchanges (CEX) has significantly increased, reaching $38 billion in March alone, far higher than the monthly average of $8 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 and Hate" Between Bullish and EOS

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

Although after the news of Bullish secretly submitting an IPO application, the price of A (formerly EOS) rose by 17%, in fact, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish is not good, because Block.one abandoned EOS and then embraced Bullish.

Back in 2017, the public chain track was in its golden age. Block.one introduced EOS with a white paper, a super public chain project that claimed "million TPS, zero fees", attracting global investors to flock to it. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through an ICO, setting an industry record and igniting the fantasy of an "Ethereum killer".

However, the dream started quickly and collapsed just as fast. After the EOS mainnet launched, users quickly found that the chain was not as "invincible" as advertised. Although transfers did not require fees, they had to stake CPU and RAM, with complex processes and high operational barriers; node elections were not the "democratic governance" imagined, but were quickly controlled by large holders and exchanges, leading to issues like vote buying and mutual voting.

But what really accelerated EOS's decline was not just technical issues, but more so the internal resource allocation problems within Block.one.

Block.one originally promised to allocate $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but in reality, it did the opposite: it bought U.S. bonds in large quantities, hoarded 160,000 Bitcoins, invested in the failed social product Voice, and used the money for stock trading and domain name purchases... The amount actually used to support EOS developers was pitifully small.

At the same time, power within the company was highly centralized, with core executives almost entirely composed 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 became a precursor to the complete split between Block.one and EOS.

What really ignited the anger of the EOS community was the debut of Bullish.

Block.one founder BB

In 2021, Block.one announced the launch of the crypto trading platform Bullish, claiming to have completed $10 billion in financing, with a luxurious list of investors—including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Wall Street veteran Mike Novogratz, and other top-tier capital support. This new platform focused on compliance and stability, aiming to build a "bridge" for institutional investors in crypto finance.

But this Bullish, from technology to brand, had almost no connection with EOS—it didn't use EOS technology, didn't accept EOS tokens, didn't acknowledge any association with EOS, not even a basic thank you.

For the EOS community, this was nothing short of a public betrayal: Block.one used the resources accumulated from building EOS to start a "new love". And EOS was left behind completely.

Thus, the counterattack from the EOS community began.

At the end of 2021, the community launched a "fork uprising", attempting to sever Block.one's control. The EOS Foundation, as the community representative, stepped forward to negotiate with Block.one. But over the course of a month, the two sides discussed various plans without reaching an agreement. Finally, the EOS Foundation, together with 17 nodes, revoked Block.one's power status and kicked it out of EOS management. In 2022, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) filed a lawsuit, accusing it of abandoning its ecosystem commitments; in 2023, the community even considered a hard fork to completely isolate Block.one and Bullish's assets.

Related reading: "The Whole Story of EOS Nodes Stopping Block.one Account Releases: The Parent Company Kicked Out by the Community".

After the split between EOS and Block.one, the EOS community engaged in years of litigation with Block.one over the ownership of the initially raised funds, but so far Block.one still owns the funds' ownership and usage rights.

So in the eyes of many in the EOS community, Bullish is not a "new project", but more like a symbol of betrayal, and this Bullish, which secretly submitted an IPO application, remains the "new love" that exchanged their ideals for reality—glamorous, but shameful.

In 2025, EOS officially changed its name to Vaulta to cut ties with the past, building Web3 banking services on the public chain foundation, and also renamed the token EOS to A.

How Rich is Block.one, Exactly?

What we all know is that in the early days, Block.one raised $4.2 billion, becoming the largest fundraising event in crypto history. In theory, this fund could support EOS's long-term development, support developers, promote technological innovation, and allow the ecosystem to grow continuously. When EOS ecosystem developers begged for funding, Block.one only threw out a $50,000 check—this amount isn't even enough to pay a Silicon Valley programmer's salary for two months.

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

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 total assets (including cash and invested funds) were $3 billion. Of this $3 billion, about $2.2 billion was invested in U.S. government bonds.

Where did this $4.2 billion go? Mainly in three directions: $2.2 billion in U.S. bonds: low risk, stable returns, ensuring wealth preservation; 160,000 Bitcoins; a small amount of stock trading and acquisition attempts: such as the failed Silvergate investment, purchasing the Voice domain name, etc.

What many people don't know is that EOS's parent company, Block.one, is currently the private company holding the most Bitcoins, with a total of 160,000 BTC, 40,000 more than stablecoin giant Tether.

Data source: bitcointreasuries

At the current price of $117,200, this 160,000 BTC is worth approximately $18.752 billion. That is to say, just from the appreciation of this Bitcoin, Block.one has made a paper profit of over $14.5 billion, about 4.47 times the amount raised in the ICO.

From the perspective of "cash flow is king", Block.one is very successful today, even more "forward-looking" than MicroStrategy, and one of the most profitable "project parties" in crypto history. It's just that it didn't achieve this by "building a great blockchain", but by "how to maximize the preservation of principal, expand assets, and exit smoothly".

This is the ironic and real other side of the crypto world: in the crypto circle, the one who wins in the end is not necessarily the one with the "best technology" or the "most burning ideals", but the one who understands compliance the most, knows how to adapt to the times, and is best at keeping the money.