Original Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, BlockBeats
Reprint: Oliver, Mars Finance
The issuer of USDC, Circle, successfully went public on the US stock market, soaring 168% on its first day and raising $1.1 billion, becoming the first stock of a stablecoin; Gemini also quickly followed by submitting its IPO documents; meanwhile, another trading platform that had received less attention, Bullish, has also been reported by the media to have secretly submitted its listing application to the SEC.
In the most profitable CEX track in the crypto world, Bullish is not a well-known name, but in fact, its “background” is quite impressive.
In 2018, EOS emerged as the so-called killer of Ethereum, and the company behind it, Block.one, conducted the longest and highest amount ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in history, raising an astonishing total of 4.2 billion dollars.
A few years later, when the hype around EOS faded, Block.one “started anew” and launched a cryptocurrency trading platform called Bullish, which focuses on compliance and targets the traditional financial market, and as a result, was “kicked out” of the EOS community.
In July 2021, Bullish officially launched. The initial startup capital included $100 million in cash from Block.one, 164,000 bitcoins (worth about $9.7 billion at the time), and 20 million EOS; external investors also added $300 million, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, hedge fund mogul Alan Howard, and well-known crypto industry investor Mike Novogratz.
Calculating this way, the total asset scale when Bullish goes live will exceed 10 billion dollars, which can be considered extremely luxurious.
Dear “Circle” and “Tether”, Bullish “Aiming for Compliance”
The positioning of Bullish has been clear from the beginning; scale is not important, but compliance is.
Because Bullish’s ultimate goal is not to earn a profit in the crypto world, but to create a legitimate trading platform that can go public.
Prior to the official operation, Bullish entered into an agreement with a publicly traded company, Far Peak, to invest $840 million to acquire a 9% stake in the company and carry out a $2.5 billion merger to achieve a curve listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.
At that time, the media reported that Bullish was valued at 9 billion dollars.
The former CEO of the merged company Far Peak, Thomas, is the current CEO of Bullish. He has a very strong compliance background: previously served as the Chief Operating Officer and President of the New York Stock Exchange, where he performed exceptionally; established deep connections with Wall Street giants, CEOs, and institutional investors; and has extensive resources in regulation and capital.
It is worth mentioning that Farley does not have many investment and acquisition projects in Bullish, but there are quite a few notable ones in the crypto space: Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, re-staking protocol ether.fi, and blockchain media CoinDesk.
In conclusion, it can be said that Bullish is the trading platform in the crypto space that most wants to become the “regular army of Wall Street.”
But ideals are rich, while reality is stark. Compliance is much harder than they imagine.
The U.S. regulatory stance is becoming increasingly strict, and Bullish’s original merger listing agreement was terminated in 2022, causing an 18-month listing plan to fall through. Bullish had also considered acquiring FTX for rapid expansion, but ultimately it did not materialize. Bullish is forced to seek new compliance paths - such as shifting focus to Asia and Europe.
Bullish team 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) issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission at the beginning of this year, as well as a virtual asset trading platform license; additionally, Bullish has also received the necessary licenses for cryptocurrency asset trading and custody issued by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) in Germany.
Bullish has approximately 260 employees worldwide, with more than half based in Hong Kong, and the rest distributed in places like Singapore, the United States, and Gibraltar.
Another obvious manifestation of the bullish “aiming for compliance” is: close to “Circle,” far from “Tether.”
On the Bullish platform, the top trading pairs by volume in stablecoins are USDC, rather than the larger and more historically established USDT. This reflects a clear stance in regulatory attitudes.
In recent years, USDT’s market dominance has begun to falter as it continues to come under regulatory pressure from the SEC in the United States. On the other hand, USDC, as a stablecoin jointly launched by compliance companies Circle and Coinbase, has not only successfully listed on the U.S. stock market, but has also been favored by the capital market as the “first stablecoin stock”, with excellent stock price trends. With good transparency and regulatory adaptability, USDC’s trading volume continues to soar.
According to the latest report released by Kaiko, the trading volume of USDC on centralized exchanges (CEX) significantly increased in 2024, reaching 38 billion USD in March alone, far exceeding the average monthly volume of 8 billion USD 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 I had to describe the relationship between Bullish and EOS in one sentence, it would be like an ex and a current partner.
Although the news about Bullish secretly submitting an IPO application caused the price of A (formerly EOS) to rise by 17%, in fact, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish is not good, because Block.one turned its back on EOS and embraced Bullish.
Back in 2017, the public blockchain sector was at its golden age. Block.one released a white paper introducing EOS, a super public chain project that touted “one million TPS and zero fees,” attracting a swarm of global investors in no time. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through its ICO, breaking industry records and igniting a fantasy of being the “Ethereum killer.”
However, the dream started quickly and collapsed just as fast. After the EOS mainnet launched, users soon realized that this chain was not as “invincible” as advertised. Although transfers do not incur fees, it requires staking CPU and RAM, making the process complex and the operational threshold high; node elections are not the “democratic governance” one might imagine, but rather quickly controlled by large holders and exchanges, leading to issues such as bribery and vote swapping.
But the real reason for EOS’s accelerated decline is not just technical issues, but more about the internal resource allocation problems within Block.one.
Block.one originally promised to allocate $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but their actual actions have been completely opposite: making large-scale purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds, hoarding 160,000 bitcoins, investing in the failed social product Voice, and even using the funds for stock trading and domain purchases… The amount truly used to support EOS developers is pitifully small.
At the same time, the power within the company is highly concentrated, with almost all core executives composed of Block.one founder BB and his relatives and friends, forming a small circle-like “family business.” After 2020, BM announced his departure from the project, which also became a precursor to the complete fracture of the relationship between Block.one and EOS.
What truly ignited the anger of the EOS community was the arrival of Bullish.
Block.one founder BB
In 2021, Block.one announced the launch of the crypto trading platform Bullish and claimed to have completed $10 billion in financing, with a luxurious list of investors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Wall Street veteran Mike Novogratz among other top-tier capital supporters. This new platform focuses on compliance and stability, aiming to build a “bridge” for institutional investors into crypto finance.
But this company Bullish has almost no relationship with EOS in terms of technology or branding—does not use EOS technology, does not accept EOS tokens, does not acknowledge any connection with EOS, and even lacks the most basic gratitude.
For the EOS community, this is nothing short of a public betrayal: Block.one is using the resources accumulated from building EOS to start a ‘new love’ elsewhere. And EOS has been completely left behind.
Thus, the counterattack from the EOS community began.
At the end of 2021, the community initiated a “fork uprising,” attempting to sever Block.one’s control. The EOS Foundation, as a representative of the community, stepped forward to negotiate with Block.one. However, after a month of discussions on various proposals, no consensus was reached. Ultimately, the EOS Foundation united with 17 nodes to revoke Block.one’s power status, effectively removing it from the EOS management. In 2022, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) filed a lawsuit, accusing it of abandoning ecological commitments; by 2023, the community even considered completely isolating Block.one and Bullish’s assets through a hard fork.
After the split between EOS and Block.one, the EOS community has been engaged in a lawsuit with Block.one for several years over the ownership of the funds raised initially, but so far Block.one still retains ownership and usage rights to the funds.
Therefore, in the eyes of many in the EOS community, Bullish is not so much a “new project” as it is a symbol of betrayal, and this Bullish that secretly submitted its IPO application has always been that “new love” that traded its ideals for reality—glamorous, yet shameful.
In 2025, EOS officially renamed itself to Vaulta to cut ties with the past, building Web3 banking services on the foundation of the public chain, while also renaming the token EOS to A.
How much money does the wealthy Block.one really have?
What we all know is that early on, Block.one raised $4.2 billion, becoming the largest fundraising event in the history of cryptocurrency. In theory, this funding could support the long-term development of EOS, help developers, promote technological innovation, and allow the ecosystem to continue to grow. When EOS ecosystem developers begged for funding, Block.one only tossed out a $50,000 check – which is not even enough to pay a Silicon Valley programmer’s salary for two months.
“Where did the 4.2 billion dollars go?” the community asks.
In an email dated March 19, 2019, BM disclosed part of the answers to Block.one shareholders: as of February 2019, the assets held by Block.one (including cash and invested funds) totaled $3 billion. Of this $3 billion, approximately $2.2 billion was invested in U.S. government bonds.
Where did this $4.2 billion go? Generally, it can be divided into three main directions: $2.2 billion buying government bonds: low risk, stable returns, ensuring wealth preservation; 160,000 Bitcoins: now worth over $16 billion; a small amount in stock trading and acquisition attempts: such as the failed SilverGate investment and the purchase of the Voice domain, etc.
What many people do not know is that Block.one, the parent company of EOS, is currently the private company holding the largest amount of Bitcoin, with a total of 160,000 BTC, which is 40,000 more than the stablecoin giant Tether.
Data Source: bitcointreasuries
At the current price of $109,650, this 160,000 BTC is worth approximately $17.544 billion. In other words, just from the appreciation of this Bitcoin, Block.one has earned over $13 billion on paper, which is about 4.18 times the amount raised during the ICO.
From the perspective of “cash flow is king”, Block.one is very successful today, and it can even be said to be a more “forward-looking” company than MicroStrategy, and one of the most profitable “project parties” in the history of cryptocurrency. However, it does so not by “building a great blockchain”, but by “maximizing capital preservation, expanding assets, and exiting smoothly.”
This is precisely the irony and reality of the crypto world: in the currency circle, the one who wins in the end is not necessarily the one with the “best technology” and the “most passionate ideals,” but rather the one who understands compliance the best, knows how to adapt to circumstances, and excels at retaining money.
