Crypto conquered the stock market again with the public debut of crypto exchange Bullish, whose stock soared as much as 220% on its opening day Wednesday after raising $1.1 billion in its IPO. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Aug 13, 2025
The Briefing
By Ken Brown
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Crypto conquered the stock market again with the public debut of crypto exchange Bullish, whose stock soared as much as 220% on its opening day Wednesday after raising $1.1 billion in its IPO. The offering followed a glittering IPO from stablecoin issuer Circle and offerings from a raft of companies that have stuffed themselves with crypto.
For an industry that says it wants to overtake the traditional financial system, it is surprising that crypto players are focusing so heavily on old-style stock listings. These offerings are a lucrative business for the giant banks that choreograph them, exactly the companies crypto enthusiasts hope to unseat. Going public also subjects crypto companies to just the kind of financial regulations they hate.
Maybe crypto executives just want to get rich, and a stock exchange listing is one more way to separate investors from their cash.
Along the way, crypto has become a big part of an already frothy stock market. Do a quick tally of the biggest crypto stocks, including exchanges like Coinbase, companies such as Strategy that hold crypto, plus bitcoin miners and the rapidly growing crypto exchange-traded funds, and you get more than $400 billion in crypto stocks trading on U.S. stock exchanges.
The skeptical view of that $400 billion is that it is a house of cards. Most of the underlying assets are only worth what other investors are willing to pay for them. Just two years ago, amid the FTX debacle, investors valued those assets far below where they trade now.
As for Bullish, it is worth roughly $10 billion at its closing price of $68, up 84% from its IPO price. While it is growing nicely, that valuation is something more than a modest premium to the $80 million in profits it generated last year. Bullish lost more than that in the first quarter. (Give it credit for sneaking its ticker symbol [BLSH] past the arbiters of taste at the New York Stock Exchange.)
Bullish is led by CEO Tom Farley. His previous job as president of the NYSE gives him impeccable credentials in traditional finance. His take is that investors are betting crypto will take over the world. “The market is pricing in the potential for blockchain technology to power all of major global finance,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
Some of his underwriters, which include JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, might object to that plan.
Until the past year, crypto has been a sideshow for the financial system. The collapse of FTX was largely contained. Now, hundreds of billions of dollars of crypto stocks are trading on traditional markets. Stablecoin legislation signed by the president last month brings crypto even closer to traditional finance.
Maybe crypto will take over the world. But what if it doesn’t?
OpenAI Wins a Round
OpenAI has won a round in its long-running legal battle with Elon Musk. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the judge hearing the case, ruled against Musk’s effort to throw out an OpenAI counterclaim that his legal action is “part of a years-long harassment campaign perpetrated by Musk against OpenAI because he ‘could not tolerate seeing…success for an enterprise he had abandoned and declared doomed.’”
Musk, a co-founder and early backer of OpenAI, is suing the company for allegedly violating its charitable mission by setting up a for-profit arm and then trying to restructure in a way that could reduce the nonprofit’s control. The judge’s ruling on Wednesday means that OpenAI’s counterclaim will be tried in the next stage of the litigation.
The legal reasoning for Roger’s latest decision is a little opaque for a nonlawyer. But from the point of view of a casual observer, it certainly looks like Musk has a bellyful of sour grapes. OpenAI has become by far the leading force in artificial intelligence. Musk’s newish venture, xAI, lags far behind, as good as its Grok chatbot might be. He has lately taken to complaining about how Apple’s App Store treats OpenAI compared with Grok. Talk about grumbling!—Martin Peers
In Other News
• Amazon announced plans to expand its same-day grocery-delivery offering to more than 2,300 U.S. cities by the end of this year, as the e-commerce giant aims to continue to grow sales of low-margin but frequently purchased items like groceries and personal care products. The service is currently live in more than 1,000 cities, Amazon said.
• Payments giant Stripe will tap Matt Huang, co-founder and managing partner at crypto venture firm Paradigm, to lead its upcoming blockchain, Tempo, according to Fortune.
• A top executive of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said the company has enough chips to keep developing its own AI models, despite U.S. export controls on Nvidia’s AI chips to China (more here).
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