The bottom of Bullish: The parent company threw over 160,000 BTC and made a huge profit of 10 billion dollars in 6 years

Author: Jaleel Ga-6, Peggy

Original title: Bullish: Parent Company Lowered 160,000 BTC and Earned 10 Billion Dollars in 6 Years

USDC issuer Circle was successfully listed on the US stock market. It surged 168% on the first day, raising 1.1 billion US dollars, and became the first stablecoin; Gemini also followed suit by submitting an IPO document; while Bullish, another trading platform that few people had mentioned before, was also revealed by the media that it had secretly submitted a listing application to the SEC.

Bullish isn't a familiar name on the most profitable CEX circuit in the coin industry, but in fact, its “origin” is actually very prominent.

In 2018, EOS came out of nowhere, claiming to be the terminator of Ethereum. Block.one, the company behind it, relied on this boom to conduct the longest and most expensive ICO (initial coin offering) in history, raising an astonishing $4.2 billion.

A few years later, when the popularity of EOS dissipated, Block.one “started again” and turned its head into Bullish, a cryptocurrency trading platform that focused on compliance and aimed at traditional financial markets, and was “swept away” by the EOS community as a result.

Bullish was officially launched in July 2021. The initial start-up capital included $100 million in cash, 164,000 bitcoins (worth around $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 Mike Novogratz, a well-known investor in the crypto industry.

Calculated in this way, Bullish's total assets when it went live exceeded 10 billion US dollars, making it extremely luxurious.

Far from “Circle” and “Tether”, Bullish “aims to be compliant”

Bullish's positioning was clear right from the start. Size doesn't matter, but compliance matters.

Because Bullish's ultimate goal is not to make a lot of profit in the crypto world, but to be a formal trading platform that “can go public.”

Prior to official operation, Bullish reached an agreement with Far Peak, a listed company, to invest US$840 million to acquire 9% of the company's shares and carry out a US$2.5 billion merger to achieve a curved listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.

According to media reports at the time, Bullish was valued at $9 billion.

Thomas, the former CEO of the merged company Far Peak, is the current CEO of Bullish. He has a strong compliance background: previously the chief operating officer and president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he excelled during his time; established deep relationships with Wall Street giants, CEOs, and institutional investors; and has extensive resources at the regulatory and capital levels.

It is worth mentioning that there aren't many foreign investment and acquisition projects by Farley in Bullish, but there are quite a few popular ones in the cryptocurrency industry: Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, re-staking agreement ether.fi, and blockchain media CoinDesk.

Anyway, it can be said that Bullish is a trading platform that most wants to become a “regular Wall Street army” in the coin industry.

But ideals are rich; reality is very boring. Compliance is more difficult than they thought.

The US regulatory attitude is getting tougher. Bullish's original merger listing agreement ended in 2022, and the 18-month listing plan came to an end. Bullish also considered the acquisition of FTX to achieve rapid expansion, but ultimately failed to do so. Bullish was forced to find new paths to compliance — such as moving to Asia and Europe.

Bullish team at Hong Kong Consensus Conference

Bullish also obtained a Class 1 license (engaging in securities trading) and a Class 7 license (providing automated trading services) and a virtual asset trading platform license from the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission at the beginning of this year; in addition, Bullish also obtained the required licenses for crypto asset trading and custody from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFIN).

Bullish has around 260 employees around the world, with more than half based in Hong Kong, and the rest in Singapore, the US, and Gibraltar.

Another obvious sign of Bullish's “ambition to be compliant” is: pro-“ Circle” and far from “Tether.”

On the Bullish platform, the first few stablecoin trading pairs with the largest trading volume are USDC, rather than USDT, which has a larger circulation scale and a longer history. What is behind this is reflected in its clear stance on supervision.

In recent years, as USDT continues to be pressured by the US SEC, its market dominance has begun to waver. On the other hand, USDC, as a stablecoin jointly launched by compliance companies Circle and Coinbase, was not only successfully listed on the US stock market, but was also favored by the capital market as the “first stablecoin”, and the stock price trend is excellent. With good transparency and regulatory adaptability, USDC's trading volume continues to soar.

According to the latest report released by Kaiko, USDC's trading volume on centralized exchanges (CEX) rose markedly in 2024, reaching $38 billion in March alone, far higher than the monthly average of $8 billion in 2023. Among them, Bullish and Bybit are the two platforms with the largest USDC trading volume, and together they account for about 60% of the market share.

Bullish and EOS's “Love Hate Feud”

If I had to describe the relationship between Bullish and EOS in one sentence, it would be between the former and the current.

Although the price of A (formerly EOS) rose 17% after news broke that Bullish had secretly submitted an IPO application, in fact, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish was not good because Block.one turned around and embraced Bullish after abandoning EOS.

Back in 2017, the public chain circuit was in a golden age. Block.one launched EOS in a white paper, a superchain project that called out the slogan “one million TPS, zero processing fees”, which attracted investors from around the world for a while. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through the ICO, breaking industry records and igniting the illusion of being the “terminator of Ethereum.”

However, the dream began quickly, and the collapse came quickly. After the EOS main network went live, users soon discovered that the chain was not as “invincible” as advertised. Although there are no processing fees for transfers, CPU and RAM must be pledged. The process is complicated, and the operating threshold is high; instead, node elections were not “democratic governance” as imagined; instead, they were quickly controlled by large players and exchanges, causing problems such as election bribery and mutual voting.

But what really accelerated the decline of EOS was not only technical issues, but also resource allocation issues within Block.one.

Block.one originally promised to spend $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but what it actually did was the exact opposite: buying large amounts of US debt, hoarding 160,000 bitcoins, investing in the failed social product Voice, and using the money to trade stocks and buy domain names... there are very few that actually support EOS developers.

At the same time, power within the company is highly concentrated, and almost all of the core executives are composed of BB, the founder of Block.one, and his family and friends, forming a “family business” in the form of a small circle. After 2020, BM announced her departure from the project, which was a precursor to the complete split of Block.one's relationship with EOS.

What really fueled the EOS community's anger was the launch of Bullish.

BB, founder of Block.one

In 2021, Block.one announced the launch of the crypto trading platform Bullish and claimed that it had completed $10 billion in financing, with a rich list of investors — backed by first-tier capital such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and veteran Wall Street player Mike Novogratz. The new platform focuses on compliance and robustness to build a “bridge” for institutional investors to crypto finance.

But this Bullish, from technology to brand, has almost nothing to do with EOS — it doesn't use EOS technology, doesn't accept EOS tokens, doesn't acknowledge being associated with EOS, and doesn't even have the most basic appreciation.

For the EOS community, this is tantamount to an open betrayal: Block.one uses the resources accumulated by building EOS to reinvent a “new love”. EOS, on the other hand, was completely left where it was.

So the backlash from the EOS community began.

At the end of 2021, the community launched a “forked revolt” in an attempt to sever control of Block.one. The EOS Foundation came forward as a community representative and began negotiations with Block.one. However, over the course of a month, the two sides discussed various proposals, but none of them reached an agreement. Finally, the EOS Foundation joined forces with 17 nodes to revoke Block.one's position of power and kick it out of EOS management. In 2022, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) initiated legal action accusing it of reneging on its ecological promises; in 2023, the community even considered completely isolating Block.one and Bullish's assets through a hard fork.

Related reading:《EOS Node Stops Block.one Account Release Incident Beginning and End: Parent Company Kicked Out by Community”.

After EOS and Block.one split, the EOS community filed lawsuits with it for several years over the ownership of the funds raised, but until now, Block.one still owns and uses the funds.

Therefore, in the eyes of many people in the EOS community, Bullish is not a “new project,” but more like a symbol of betrayal, and this Bullish, who secretly submitted an IPO application, has always been the “new love” that uses their ideals in exchange for reality — bright yet shameful.

In 2025, in order to cut through the past, EOS officially changed its name to Vaulta, built Web3 banking services based on a public chain, and also changed the name of the token EOS to A.

How much is the rich Block.one really worth?

We all know that early on, Block.one raised $4.2 billion, making it the largest funding event in crypto history. Arguably, this funding can support the long-term development of EOS, support developers, promote technological innovation, and allow the ecosystem to continue to grow. When EOS ecosystem developers pleaded for funding, Block.one only threw out a $50,000 cheque—not enough to pay a Silicon Valley programmer's salary for two months.

“Where did the $4.2 billion go?” Community questions.

In an email to Block.one shareholders on March 19, 2019, BM revealed part of the answer: As of February 2019, Block.one held a total of $3 billion in assets (including cash and invested funds). Of these 3 billion miles, about $2.2 billion was invested in US government bonds.

Where did that $4.2 billion go? Broadly speaking, there are three major directions: buying treasury bonds for $2.2 billion: low risk, stable returns to ensure wealth preservation; 160,000 bitcoins: now worth over 16 billion US dollars; small stock trading and acquisition attempts: such as the failed Silvergate investment and purchase of the Voice domain name.

What many people don't know is that EOS parent company Block.one is currently the private company that holds the largest amount of bitcoins, with a total of 160,000 BTC, 40,000 more than stablecoin giant Tether.

Data source: Bitcoin Treasury

At the current price of $109,650, this amount of 160,000 BTC is worth approximately $17.544 billion. In other words, with the added value of Bitcoin alone, Block.one earned more than $13 billion on its book, which is about 4.18 times the amount of ICO financing in that year.

From the perspective of “cash flow is king,” Block.one is very successful today. It can even be said that it is a more “forward-looking” company than MicroStrategy, and one of the most profitable “project parties” in crypto history. However, it does not rely on “building a great blockchain,” but on “how to maximize capital, expand assets, and exit the market smoothly.”

This is the opposite of irony and reality in the crypto world: in the cryptocurrency world, the last winner is not necessarily the one with the “best technology” and the “most aggressive in ideals”, but probably the one who knows the most about compliance, the best at reviewing the current situation, and the best at retaining money.