Author: Jaleel Jia Liu, Peggy, Rhythm BlockBeas USDC issuer Circle successfully listed on the US stock market, soaring 168% on the first day, raising $1.1 billion, becoming the first stock of a stablecoin; Gemini quickly followed with the submission of IPO documents; another trading platform Bullish, which had previously received little mention, has also been reported by the media to have secretly submitted a 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 illustrious. In 2018, EOS emerged, claiming to be the Ethereum killer, and the company behind it, Block.one, conducted the longest and highest ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in history, raising an astonishing $4.2 billion. A few years later, as the enthusiasm for EOS faded, Block.one 'started anew' and turned to create a cryptocurrency trading platform focused on compliance and targeting the traditional financial market - Bullish, and thus was 'kicked out' by the EOS community. In July 2021, Bullish officially launched. The initial funding 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 investor Mike Novogratz. Calculating this way, the total asset scale of Bullish at launch exceeded $10 billion, which could be considered extremely luxurious. Close to 'Circle' and far from 'Tether', Bullish 'aims for compliance'. Bullish's positioning has been clear from the start, scale is not important, but compliance is very important. Because Bullish's ultimate goal is not to make a profit in the crypto world, but to create a legitimate trading platform 'that can go public'. Before officially operating, Bullish reached an agreement with a listed company Far Peak to invest $840 million to acquire 9% of the company's shares and conduct a $2.5 billion merger to achieve a backdoor listing, lowering the traditional IPO threshold. At the time, media reports valued Bullish at $9 billion. The former CEO of the merged company Far Peak, Thomas, is currently Bullish's CEO, who has a very strong compliance background: he was previously the Chief Operating Officer and President of the New York Stock Exchange and performed excellently during his tenure; he has established deep connections with Wall Street giants, CEOs, and institutional investors; he has extensive resources in regulation and capital. It is worth mentioning that Farley does not have many external investment and acquisition projects in Bullish, but there are quite a few that are well-known in the crypto circle: Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, restaking protocol ether.fi, blockchain media CoinDesk. In summary, it can be said that Bullish is the trading platform in the crypto circle that wants to become the 'regular army of Wall Street' the most. But ideals are full, reality is thin. Compliance is much more difficult than they imagined. The U.S. regulatory attitude is becoming increasingly tough, and Bullish's original merger listing agreement was terminated in 2022, and the 18-month listing plan was aborted. Bullish also considered acquiring FTX for rapid expansion, but ultimately it did not materialize. 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 (for securities trading) and a Type 7 license (for 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 received the required licenses for cryptocurrency asset trading and custody issued by the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) in Germany. Bullish has approximately 260 employees globally, with more than half stationed in Hong Kong, and the rest distributed in Singapore, the United States, and Gibraltar. Another obvious manifestation of Bullish's 'aim for compliance' is: close to 'Circle', far from 'Tether'. On the Bullish platform, the top trading pairs of stablecoins by trading volume are USDC, rather than the larger and older circulating USDT. Behind this reflects its clear stance on regulatory attitude. In recent years, as USDT has faced increasing regulatory pressure from the 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, not only successfully listed on the U.S. stock market but also received favor from the capital market as the 'first stock of stablecoins', with excellent stock price performance. With good transparency and regulatory adaptability, USDC's trading volume continues to soar. According to the latest report released by Kaiko, in 2024, USDC's trading volume on centralized exchanges (CEX) significantly increased, reaching $38 billion in March alone, far exceeding the monthly average of $8 billion 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.If one were to describe the relationship between Bullish and EOS in one sentence, it would be ex and current. Although after the news of Bullish secretly submitting an IPO application, the price of A (original EOS) rose by 17%, in fact, the relationship between the EOS community and Bullish is not good because Block.one, after abandoning EOS, turned around and embraced Bullish. Back in 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 'one million TPS, zero transaction fees', attracting global investors. Within a year, EOS raised $4.2 billion through ICO, breaking industry records and igniting a fantasy belonging to 'the Ethereum killer'. However, the dream started quickly, and the collapse came just as fast. After the EOS mainnet went live, users quickly found that the chain was not as 'invincible' as advertised. Although transfers did not require transaction fees, CPU and RAM needed to be staked, the process was complicated, and the operational threshold was high; node elections were not the 'democratic governance' imagined, but were quickly controlled by large holders and exchanges, leading to bribery, vote trading, and other issues. But what truly accelerated EOS's decline was not just technical issues, but more so from internal resource allocation problems within Block.one. Block.one originally promised to allocate $1 billion to support the EOS ecosystem, but what they actually did was the exact opposite: buying U.S. government bonds, hoarding 160,000 Bitcoins, investing in the failed social product Voice, and using the money to speculate in stocks and buy domain names... The actual amount used to support EOS developers was pitifully small. At the same time, the company's internal power was highly centralized, with core executives almost entirely 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 became a harbinger of the complete split between Block.one and EOS. What truly ignited the anger of the EOS community was the arrival of Bullish.Data source: bitcointreasuries. At current prices of $109,650, the 160,000 Bitcoins are worth approximately $17.544 billion. This means that just from the appreciation of this Bitcoin, Block.one has earned over $13 billion on paper, about 4.18 times the amount raised in 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 company with more 'foresight' than MicroStrategy, as well as one of the most profitable 'project parties' in crypto history. However, it did not rely on 'building a great blockchain' but on 'how to maximize the preservation of principal, expand assets, and exit smoothly'. This is the ironic and real other side of the crypto world: in the crypto circle, the one who wins in the end is not necessarily the one with the 'best technology' and 'most burning ideals', but possibly the one who understands compliance best, adapts to the situation best, and is best at holding onto money.

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