CoinDesk Owner Bullish Triples in Trading Debut. The Stock Is Already Living Up to Its Name. — Barrons.com
Paul R. La Monica and Brian SwintWith Bitcoin prices hovering near a record high of above $120,000, and newly public stablecoin company Circle Internet Group reporting strong earnings, it looks like this is a great time to be bullish on cryptocurrencies.Bullish, a crypto exchange, is testing for the market's appetite for both Bitcoin and initial public offerings on Wednesday, and the early results are favorable. The stock had a promising debut.Shares of Bullish, which also owns the crypto news and data site CoinDesk, are trading under the ticker BLSH on the New York Stock Exchange.Demand is robust. The stock opened at $90 a share and quickly moved even higher before being halted, ultimately more than tripling the $37 share price that the company set late Tuesday. Shares edged back a bit to $91 following the halt, still 145% above its offering price.The IPO price was already well above Bullish's expected offering price range of $32 to $33. Bullish will raise more than $1.1 billion from its sale of 30 million shares. At the open price, and with 150.7 million shares outstanding, Bullish had a market value of $13.6 billion.Bullish also has a well-known executive in the C-suite, and an impressive list of backers and potential investors. Tom Farley, a former president of Intercontinental Exchange who was in charge of the New York Stock Exchange, is Bullish's CEO, and is set to add the chairman title after the close of the IPO.Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Thiel Capital were early investors in Block.one, the blockchain software company that helped launch Bullish in 2021. Galaxy Digital, another prominent crypto firm, has a stake in Bullish, as well. Bullish has also said that iShares owner BlackRock and Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management expressed interest in buying up to a combined $200 million of shares at the IPO price.Bullish reported a loss in the first quarter of 2025 after posting a profit in the same period a year ago. But the company also said in its most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it expects to earn $106.1 million to $109.1 million in the second quarter of this year.And if crypto prices continue to rise, that bodes well for Bullish, too. The company, like many firms, also has invested in cryptocurrencies as part of its corporate treasury strategy. Bullish holds about $2 billion in crypto on its balance sheet. The bulk of that is in Bitcoin, but the company also has a small position in Ether, as well as some stablecoins.One analyst who issued a report on Bullish before its IPO noted that the company's focus on Bitcoin and Ether could make it a less-risky stock than other crypto exchanges, such as Coinbase Global, which tend to have a larger focus on individual traders who are willing to bet on smaller coins."Bullish's institutional focus provides more-consistent performance than retail trading platforms," said Ed Engel, an analyst with Compass Point Research & Trading, in a report. "Retail traders typically over index to Altcoins, particularly during bull markets."Engel noted that trading activity for other cryptos tends to be more volatile than for Bitcoin and Ether. Of course, anything with big ties to crypto is inherently risky. But investors may have more good reasons to be bullish about Bullish for the long haul.Write to Paul R. La Monica at [email protected] content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.