Bullish: The parent company buys 160,000 BTC at the bottom, earning 10 billion in 6 years

The issuer of USDC, Circle, successfully went public on the US stock market, surging 168% on its first day and raising $1.1 billion, becoming the first stablecoin stock; Gemini also followed suit by submitting IPO documents; while Bullish, a trading platform that had previously been rarely mentioned, was reported by the media to have secretly submitted a listing application to the SEC.  

In the most profitable CEX track in the cryptocurrency industry, Bullish is not a household name, but in fact, its "background" is extremely prominent.  

In 2018, EOS emerged, claiming to be the terminator of Ethereum. The company behind it, Block.one, relied on this upsurge to carry out the longest and highest - amount ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in history, raising an astonishing $4.2 billion in total.  

A few years later, when the heat of EOS dissipated, Block.one "started a new business" and turned to establish a cryptocurrency trading platform called Bullish, which focuses on compliance and targets the traditional financial market. As a result, it was "expelled" from the EOS community.  

In July 2021, Bullish was officially launched. The initial startup funds included: $100 million in cash invested by Block.one, 164,000 bitcoins (valued at approximately $9.7 billion at that time), and 20 million EOS; external investors also added an additional $300 million, including PayPal co - founder Peter Thiel, hedge fund tycoon Alan Howard, and well - known cryptocurrency investor Mike Novogratz, among others.  

Calculated in this way, the total asset size of Bullish at the time of its launch exceeded $10 billion, which can be described as extremely luxurious.  

### Pro - "Circle" and Anti - "Tether": Bullish Aims at Compliance  

Bullish's positioning has been clear from the beginning: scale is not important, but compliance is.  

Because Bullish's ultimate goal is not to make profits in the cryptocurrency world, but to become a "listable" formal trading platform.  

Before正式operating, Bullish reached an agreement with a listed company, Far Peak. It invested $840 million to acquire a 9% stake in the company and carried out a $2.5 billion merger to achieve a roundabout listing and lower the traditional IPO threshold.  

At that time, media爆料said that Bullish was valued at $9 billion.  

The former CEO of the merged company Far Peak, Thomas, is the current CEO of Bullish. He has a very strong compliance background: he was previously the COO and President of the New York Stock Exchange, where he performed excellently; he has established deep connections with Wall Street giants, CEOs, and institutional investors; and he has extensive resources in the regulatory and capital layers.  

It is worth mentioning that although Farley has not made many external investment and acquisition projects in Bullish, there are many well - known ones in the cryptocurrency circle: the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, the restaking protocol ether.fi, and the blockchain media CoinDesk.  

In short, it can be said that Bullish is the trading platform in the cryptocurrency circle that most wants to become the "regular army of Wall Street".  

But the ideal is丰满, and the reality is骨感. Compliance is much more difficult than they imagined.  

With the increasingly tough regulatory attitude in the United States, Bullish's original merger and listing agreement was terminated in 2022, and the 18 - month listing plan failed. Bullish also considered acquiring FTX to achieve rapid expansion, but it did not materialize in the end. Bullish was forced to seek new compliance paths - such as moving to Asia and Europe.  

### The Bullish Team at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference  

Bullish also obtained a Type 1 license (engaged in securities trading) and a Type 7 license (providing automated trading services), as well as a virtual asset trading platform license issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission at the beginning of this year; in addition, Bullish also received a license required for cryptocurrency trading and custody issued by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin).  

Bullish has approximately 260 employees worldwide, more than half of whom are stationed in Hong Kong, with the rest distributed in Singapore, the United States, Gibraltar, and other places.  

Another obvious manifestation of Bullish's "commitment to compliance" is: pro - "Circle" and anti - "Tether".  

On the Bullish platform, the top few stablecoin trading pairs with the largest trading volume are all USDC, rather than USDT, which has a larger circulation scale and a longer history. Behind this reflects its clear stance on the regulatory attitude.  

In recent years, as USDT has continued to face regulatory pressure from the US SEC, its market dominance has begun to waver. On the other hand, USDC, as a stablecoin jointly launched by the compliant companies Circle and Coinbase, has not only successfully listed on the US stock market but also been favored by the capital market as the "first stablecoin stock", with excellent stock price performance. With good transparency and regulatory adaptability, the trading volume of USDC has continued to soar.  

According to the latest report released by Kaiko, the trading volume of USDC on centralized exchanges (CEX) increased significantly in 2024. In March alone, it reached $38 billion, far higher than the monthly average of $8 billion in 2023. Among them, Bullish and Bybit are the two platforms with the largest trading volume of USDC, accounting for approximately 60% of the market share together.  

### The Love - Hate Relationship Between Bullish and EOS  

If you want to describe the relationship between Bullish and EOS in one sentence, it is the relationship between the predecessor and the current one.  

Although the price of A (original EOS) rose by 17% after the news that Bullish secretly submitted an IPO application, in fact, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish is not good because Block.one embraced Bullish after abandoning EOS.  

Back to 2017, the public chain track was in its golden age. Block.one launched EOS with a white paper, a super public chain project that shouted the slogan of "one million TPS and zero handling fees". For a time, it attracted global investors to flock to it. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through ICO, refreshing the industry record and igniting a fantasy of being the "terminator of Ethereum".  

However, the dream started quickly, and the collapse also came quickly. After the EOS mainnet was launched, users quickly found that this chain was not as "invincible" as advertised. Although there is no handling fee for transfers, CPU and RAM need to be pledged, the process is complex, and the operation threshold is high; the node election is not the "democratic governance" imagined, but is quickly controlled by large households and exchanges, and problems such as bribery and vote brushing appear.  

But what really accelerated the decline of EOS was not only technical problems but more from the internal resource allocation problems of Block.one.  

Block.one had originally promised to allocate $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but what it actually did was completely the opposite: it bought US Treasury bonds on a large scale, hoarded 160,000 bitcoins, invested in the failed social product Voice, and also used the money to trade stocks and buy domain names... The amount really used to support EOS developers was pitifully small.  

At the same time, the power within the company was highly concentrated. The core executives were almost all composed of BB, the founder of Block.one, and his relatives and friends, forming a small - circle "family business". After 2020, BM announced his departure from the project, which also became a precursor to the complete split between Block.one and EOS.  

What really ignited the anger of the EOS community was the debut of Bullish.  

### BB, the Founder of Block.one  

In 2021, Block.one announced the launch of the cryptocurrency trading platform Bullish and claimed to have completed $10 billion in financing. The investor list was luxurious - including first - line capital support such as PayPal co - founder Peter Thiel and Wall Street veteran Mike Novogratz. This new platform focuses on compliance and stability and builds a "bridge" for institutional investors to enter cryptocurrency finance.  

But this Bullish, from technology to brand, has almost no relationship with EOS - it does not use EOS technology, does not accept EOS tokens, does not admit any connection with EOS, and does not even have the most basic gratitude.  

For the EOS community, this is无异于a public betrayal: Block.one used the resources accumulated by establishing EOS to start a new "new love". And EOS was completely left behind.  

So the counterattack from the EOS community began.  

At the end of 2021, the community launched a "fork uprising" to try to cut off Block.one's control. The EOS Foundation, as the representative of the community, came forward to start negotiations with Block.one. But within a month, the two sides discussed various plans but failed to reach an agreement. Finally, the EOS Foundation joined forces with 17 nodes to revoke Block.one's power status and kick it out of the EOS management. In 2022, the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) launched a legal lawsuit, accusing it of betraying the ecological promise; in 2023, the community even considered completely isolating the assets of Block.one and Bullish through a hard fork.  

After the separation between EOS and Block.one, the EOS community has carried out a years - long lawsuit with it over the ownership of the raised funds, but so far Block.one still owns the ownership and right to use 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 that secretly submitted the IPO application has always been the "new love" that exchanged their ideals for reality - glamorous, but shameful.  

In 2025, in order to cut off the past, EOS was officially renamed Vaulta, building Web3 banking services on the basis of the public chain, and also renaming the token EOS to A.  

### How Much Money Does the Rich Block.one Have Exactly?  

We all know that Block.one raised $4.2 billion in the early stage, becoming the largest financing event in cryptocurrency history. It stands to reason that this fund can support the long - term development of EOS, support developers, promote technological innovation, and let the ecosystem continue to grow. When EOS ecosystem developers begged for funding, Block.one only threw out a $50,000 check - this money was not enough to pay the salary of a Silicon Valley programmer for two months.  

"Where did the $4.2 billion go?" the community asked.  

In an email from BM to Block.one shareholders on March 19, 2019, part of the answer was disclosed: 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 US government bonds.  

Where did the $4.2 billion go?大体上, it went in three directions: $2.2 billion was used to buy treasury bonds: low risk and stable income to ensure the preservation of wealth; 160,000 bitcoins: now worth more than $16 billion; a small amount of stock trading and acquisition attempts: such as the failed investment in Silvergate and the purchase of the Voice domain name, etc.  

Many people do not know that EOS's parent company Block.one is currently the private company with the largest number of bitcoins held, with a total of 160,000 BTC, 40,000 more than the stablecoin giant Tether.  

Data source: bitcointreasuries  

Calculated at the current price of $109,650, the 160,000 BTC are worth approximately $17.544 billion. In other words, solely from the appreciation of these bitcoins, Block.one has recorded a paper profit of over $13 billion, roughly 4.18 times the amount raised in its initial coin offering (ICO) that year.  

From the perspective of "cash flow is king", Block.one has been highly successful today. It can even be described as a more "forward-looking" company than MicroStrategy and one of the most profitable "project parties" in the history of cryptocurrency. However, its success is not achieved by "building a great blockchain", but by focusing on "how to maximize capital preservation, expand assets, and exit smoothly".  

This reveals another ironic and realistic aspect of the crypto world: in the cryptocurrency market, the ultimate winner may not be the one with the "best technology" or the "most ambitious vision", but rather the one who best understands compliance, knows how to adapt to the situation, and excels at retaining capital.  

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