LONDON (Bywire News) - Block.one has injected $10bn in a new subsidiary, Bullish Global. The company has attracted investment from some of the biggest names in the business and aims to combine the privacy, compliance and performance of central order book technology with the benefits of decentralized finance architecture.
Bullish is currently focused on a 2021 release date and will offer services to institutional investors such as marketing making, lending, and portfolio management services.
It will use the public blockchain developed by Block.one, to produce a cryptographically validated and immutable audit trail of all transactions. In doing so it will be the first platform to add externally verifiable state integrity to a high-performance trading platform.
The funding has already raised eyebrows, in total it will be capitalised with $10bn spread across cash and digital assets. This includes $100m from Block.one, 164,000 BTC, and 20m EOS. They also ran a $300m investment round attracting attention from the likes of Peter Thiel, Alan Howard, Louis Bacon, Richard Li, Christian Angermayer, Galaxy Digital, and global investment bank Nomura. Thiel, Howard, Li, and Angermayer will also serve as senior advisor to the company. Coinbase’s listing in April showed the value of crypto exchanges, but it has only raised around $550m since its founding in 2012.
Speaking about the new company, Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer hailed what he sees as a transformative intervention into the crypto landscape.
“The Bullish exchange will leverage blockchain technology and a new market architecture to revolutionize the high-performance trading landscape by transparently automating expensive third-party functions and turning them into yield-generating portfolio management tools to offer institutions and individuals better and safer access to the latest cryptocurrency investment strategies,” he explained.
The DeFi approach brings a number of key benefits. Under the traditional finance model, there is always a tendency to silo assets. DeFi allows greater mobility so a cryptocurrency can be traded or used as collateral for derivatives of borrowing. It becomes much easier for investors to add digital assets to a liquidity pool that is used for market making or lending.
“Bullish’s balance sheet is strong, and its vertical integration offers stability and liquidity to the cryptocurrency space. I’m happy to join Bullish as an investor and advisor as it gets started on a long and fruitful journey,” said Thiel.
Angermayer, meanwhile, was rather more succinct in his assessment. “I am Bullish,” he said.
(Written by Tom Cropper, edited by Klaudia Fior)