The Bullish Exchange Rockets to $13.2B Valuation in Blockbuster NYSE Debut

Crypto's latest Wall Street darling just stuck the landing—hard.

The Bullish Exchange didn't just debut on the NYSE today. It detonated expectations with a $13.2 billion valuation that'll have traditional finance bros choking on their artisanal CBD seltzers.

Wall Street's crypto reckoning is here

Forget 'dipping toes in'—this is a cannonball into digital assets. The institutional money floodgates just got wider, whether old-guard bankers like it or not.

Numbers don't lie (though prospectuses might)

That $13.2B tag isn't just a vanity metric. It's a middle finger to every suit who called crypto a 'niche play.' The market's voting with its wallet—and the tally's getting harder to ignore.

One cynical footnote: At least now the SEC can pretend they 'understand' this one.

Star Premiere

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.