Peter Thiel-Backed Bullish Crypto Exchange Charges Toward NYSE Listing—Wall Street Braces for Impact
Silicon Valley meets Wall Street as Bullish—the crypto exchange heavyweight backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel—files for its NYSE debut. The move signals institutional crypto’s relentless march into mainstream finance, whether traditional players like it or not.
Thiel’s Midas touch meets digital gold
The billionaire contrarian investor, known for early bets on Facebook and Bitcoin, now aims to disrupt public markets with a crypto-native exchange. Bullish’s regulatory filings reveal a war chest of over $10 billion in digital assets—enough to make even Goldman Sachs raise an eyebrow.
Wall Street’s reluctant crypto embrace
NYSE’s listing committee reportedly fast-tracked the application, proving even old-guard institutions can’t ignore crypto’s gravitational pull. ‘They’ll monetize FOMO better than a meme coin pump-and-dump,’ quipped one anonymous hedge fund manager.
The closing irony? A Thiel-backed venture legitimizing the very system he famously called ‘zero-sum.’ Maybe even libertarian ideologues enjoy IPO paydays.
Bullish builds on big names, big volumes, and big politics
The exchange started with cash from Founders Fund, Thiel Capital, Nomura, Mike Novogratz, and others. In 2023, Bullish bought crypto news outlet CoinDesk, adding media muscle to its platform. It now competes directly with Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, as noted in the public prospectus.
Tom didn’t comment directly in the filing, but the document did include a line from Bullish’s leadership that read: “In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for bitcoin and Ether.”
This year has already seen multiple crypto companies try to grab a piece of the public market. Circle, the stablecoin issuer, went public in June and its valuation has climbed more than sevenfold since. In May, Etoro also debuted with a platform that allows users to trade crypto assets.
Novogratz’s own company, Galaxy Digital, migrated its listing from Toronto to the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, Gemini, the exchange created by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, quietly filed for its own U.S. IPO last month.
Bitcoin hasn’t been sitting still either. It’s currently trading above $117,000, a major jump from the $94,000 range it was hovering around at the start of 2025. Capital is still pouring into the sector, and that momentum is giving firms like Bullish more leverage when approaching public markets.
On the regulatory side, President Donald TRUMP signed the GENIUS Act into law on the same day as Bullish’s IPO filing. The act introduces new stablecoin regulations to protect consumers. These digital tokens are supposed to be pegged to things like the U.S. dollar and are marketed as less volatile alternatives to regular crypto.
Bullish’s SEC filing made its intentions clear: the company said it aims to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, crypto, and blockchain technology.” That wording wasn’t a throwaway. It’s directly tied to the bigger political forces backing this entire move.
Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks, who currently leads Trump’s AI and crypto strategy team, have all dumped massive funding into Trump’s reelection campaign. They’ve also pushed hard for laws that formally legitimize crypto exchanges and assets at the federal level.
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