Tom Farley-led Bullish stampedes toward IPO
Bullish kicked off marketing of a circa US$630m NYSE IPO Monday morning that the crypto-focused exchange is using to acquire stablecoin and continue to grow its business.
JP Morgan, Jefferies and Citigroup are marketing 20.3m shares at US$28-$31 for pricing after the market close next Tuesday, August 12. Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management and BlackRock committed upfront to invest US$200m in the offering, or about one-third of the total offering.
Founded in 2020, the crypto-focused exchange is planning to use the offering proceeds to purchase stablecoin. As of March 31, it held US$144m worth of stablecoin, US$1.735bn of bitcoin, US$22m of Ethereum and US$33m of other digital assets.
“We now intend to IPO because we believe that the digital assets industry is beginning its next leg of growth,” Bullish CEO Thomas Farley said in a letter to prospective investors. “We view transparency and compliance as hallmarks of how we operate Bullish, and believe those values align well with the public capital markets.”
Farley is the former CEO of both the NYSE Group and NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).
Bullish has grown rapidly through acquisitions, including the purchases of crypto data and analytics providers CoinDesk and CCData in 2023 and 2024. Going public will provide currency for additional acquisitions.
In the trailing 12 months ended March 31, Bullish generated US$51m of adjusted Ebitda on revenue of US$250m.
At the US$29.50 midpoint of the marketing range, Bullish is targeting an enterprise value of US$4.2bn on the IPO or about 12.5x 2026 Ebitda. That is cheap relative to the 22x multiple at which Coinbase currently trades, according to LSEG data and estimates from the investment banks leading the Bullish IPO.
USDC stablecoin provider Circle Internet, whose shares skyrocketed 168.5% on debut and have increased more than fivefold, is the other obvious comp. In addition to the stablecoin tie-ins, Circle’s US$1.05bn NYSE IPO was led by JP Morgan (and Citigroup) and saw Ark Investment step up with a US$150m cornerstone investment.
Bullish’s main exchange business last year processed US$284.8bn worth of bitcoin and US$144.5bn of Ethereum, giving it a 35% and 44% market share. In the first quarter, the exchange traded an average of US$2.5bn worth of bitcoin per day, according to information in its prospectus.
In addition to spot trading, the exchange recently introduced futures contracts.
The purchases of CoinDesk and CCData provide the company with fee-related income from index administration and data services.