In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
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Unpacking the Bullish IPO
In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
play_circle_outlineIntroduction of theCUBE and the significance of the Bullish IPO at NYSE.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineExploring Bullish's Hybrid Finance Model: Analyzing Business Performance and Revenue Volatility in Centralized and Decentralized Markets
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineImportance of institutional investor interest in the crypto market and IPOs.
replyShare Clip
play_circle_outlineComparison of Bullish’s strategy against competitors like Binance and Coinbase.
>> Hello. Welcome to theCUBE. We are here at the New York Stock Exchange in our East Coast studio. Of course, we've got Palo Alto connecting SiliconANGLE, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. It's like a special CUBE pod edition IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Bullish. Just rang the opening bell. Dave, we've been covering crypto since 2011. I did a little ChatGPT that said, "Hey, how long have been covering crypto?" I couldn't remember those first stories, the whole claims. Craig Wright, Satoshi to all the dark web -
Dave Vellante
>> .... >> underbelly of Bitcoin.
Dave Vellante
>> Of course.>> Yeah. Certainly unpacking the Bullish IPO on the NYSE is worthy, because we've been covering crypto and more recently, just the rise of the mainstreaming of crypto. We're seeing a lot more legitimate blockchain layer one, layer two businesses on top of this. You see the financial markets and the institutions picking it up. ETFs are out there. You're starting to see Ethereum skyrocket in price. We had Tom Lee on. We've talked to the founder of Ethereum over the years. It is a rise of the crypto ecosystem. Looks a lot like cloud computing. It's got a lot of scale involved. A lot of money's involved with the-
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of innovation, tech.>> Just so much going on, so let's kick it off. We just saw the opening bell. I got a nice one-minute clip of the opening bell. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of activity. Packed balcony. Of course, we're overlooking the floor here and of course, the NYSE Wired Crypto Trailblazer series going on this week that we're hosting, highlighting a lot of the leaders of future IPOs and the people making it happen. It's money making day meets technology. It's really amazing to see the IPO market open up and NYSE is becoming the place for crypto companies. It's iconic. It's globally recognized. People have an affinity to ringing the opening bell and being at the NYSE and of course, the media coverage coming out of here is phenomenal. And of course, we're here in the Buttonwood podium room. The NYSE Wired community's growing. You starting to see the appetite with the GENIUS Act, the Clarity Act. We covered that on our last podcast. The market is opening up big time.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I don't think these guys are going to get quite the reaction that Circle got or Figma, but it's legit. It's about a $5 billion plus valuation for this company. The background is they were founded in 2021. They were trying to do a SPAC at the height of the crypto boom and then in 2022 they said, "No. That's not going to work," so they merged with Tom Farley's company. He was the former president of the NYSE, so he's got the institutional chops and that's what these guys are all about. They've got this hybrid business model that combines centralized finance with decentralized finance, so that bring the best of both worlds. Centralized brings control and regulatory compliance. The decentralized allows you to participate in the DeFi economy, bringing in apps and all the innovation that's there. So it's an interesting model. Looking at the revenue numbers, John, it's quite amazing. In 2022 they did 73 million and then 2023, they boomed to 300 million and then last year, did 153 million. And that was due to market volatility when crypto tanked, so their trading volumes dropped and then their net income went from 29 million to 150 million, down to 10 million for the year. And then Q2 2025 is projected to be in 100 million range, so you see quite a lot of volatility in this company.>> And they're raising over a billion dollars. 30 million shares offered. I love the name, Bullish. It totally is a bull market. They got a bull in the lobby from the Circle IPO here. Obviously, the bull in Manhattan, Wall Street represents bull market. Clearly bullish on crypto and I think what's interesting about the centralized, decentralized aspect, it's also a data play. We've had many people on theCUBE just yesterday in our series and other Crypto Trailblazers, where getting data, you have a lot of these finance guys and who have institutional background and chops, as you say. They get the data game, so centralized meets decentralized. Certainly, data's going to be big, have an exchange. Of course, Bullish also acquired CoinDesk, which is a media company, so they have their own media arm. So very interesting company. Again, with Circle, it's a huge tailwind for cryptos. I think it's a good call to go out. They came out on the high end, the range. They were originally expected to be between 32 and 33. They're opening up at 37. We'll wait to see what happens with the pop or not. We'll see. It's going to be very interesting.
Dave Vellante
>> So to your point about CoinDesk, so they now have got a media arm. And I think they bought them for 70 million or so, so it was relatively short money, but the premise there is they will pull in audience that will want to trade. So we'll see if that happens, but Peter Thiel's backing them. A couple of hedge fund managers as well. The names included in the raise, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, Citi, BlackRock and Arc. So that's showing quite a bit of interest, but like I said, probably going to be somewhat more subdued than the Circle and Figma IPOs I would think.>> Yeah. And we saw CNBC has a story already talking about BitGo and then crypto exchange, Gemini also filed confidentially to go public. So the IPO window, not just for crypto. We had the former Binance Labs folks called A-Labs in here yesterday talking to us about how gen AI and crypto coming together is enabling a lot more assets on chain, whether it's bio or finance. This data game is real. I think I like this market, because it feels a lot like the cloud computing market in the early 2013 timeframe when Amazon really started to get the momentum going. You saw the basic building blocks exist. You start to see abstractions. You start to see software innovations. Obviously, the SaaS wave hit and then large scale ramp happened, so you're starting to see the formation of these crypto companies, Dave. I'd love to get your thoughts on this, because the unit economics still, in my opinion, have yet to be realized. Yeah. There's some money making going on and there are big numbers, but the headroom, if the digital asset market crosses over, you will see massive innovation in terms of new use cases and I think that's what gets my attention, especially with the institutional pickup. You're starting to see real money systems, the plumbing really adopt what's going on here. So I am very bullish. In this case, Bullish going public just on crypto, because it is inevitable that digital assets, the digital currency has to be that and of course, stable coins grounds everything with that, so again, part of the coverage is there with us, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, you're bullish, no pun intended, but pun intended, I guess. And I think to your point, there's a lot of competition in this space, which actually is an indicator of the market potential. Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap are all pretty well-established competitors that Bullish is going to face. Their differentiation is going to be going after institutional investors or institutions and building that world-class infrastructure. That's going to be their differentiator. They're not necessarily trying to go after the broader consumer market. It's really those institutions that they're trying to target. And so it's going to be interesting to see when this thing actually goes. We should explain how IPOs work here versus the NASDAQ in the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ rather. They go out at a certain time. And whatever time that is, whether the demand and supply are out of balance, doesn't matter. They go out 11:30, 12:00, 1 o'clock, whatever they've decided. Here, it's different. They actually have a market maker who says, "Let's test it. Let's game it. Let's do what ifs. What if the price is 37? What if the price is 38? What if the price is 40? What's the demand?" And they do the supply and demand and they talk to the bankers and then at some point the bankers say, "Okay. The supply and demand looks good. Maybe it'll get the pop that we want, but not too much pop. Whatever. Let's go." And that's how they pick the time. You've seen it in action. You go down to the kiosk and you can see it in real time.~>> And they bring that other bell and they make that first trade.
Dave Vellante
>> Right. Right. It's a very exciting moment.>> .
Dave Vellante
>> And so it's an homage to the throwback days of when they actually had real trading, humans trading on the floor. I guess the point there is that it's going to be interesting to see how Bullish, in their valuation, their multiples compare to some of this other more established competition. Again, they're in a very, very competitive market, but they've got some significant differentiators. It just, I think, takes more time for them to bake into the institutional market .>> Yeah. Yeah. I think what David Sacks has done with the GENIUS Act, I posted on LinkedIn yesterday, the GENIUS Act is a gift to the market. I think it's opened up a lot of opportunities and I think with the previous regime under the Biden administration and the SEC specifically, everyone had to flee the jurisdiction, if you will, the US, to go international. And I think you're going to see companies that have been bunkering in outside the United States come back in and go public, because there's real numbers behind some of these crypto companies. It's not like pump and dump schemes that you've seen with the coins. You're seeing real businesses, real crypto retail, real institutional. You're starting to see a lot more business models kicking in, so there's real mechanics in these businesses that are driving revenue. And certainly, the staking of the coins between Bitcoin and Ethereum is really huge, so I think that's going to be a big deal. So I think we'll see more IPOs come. I think the window's open right now and I think it probably will be for some time, unless someone takes a dip, lays an egg on an IPO. Then that might scare people, but right now, I think you're going to see people come out of the gate that have been doing business. Now, the question is do they have the IPO readiness? We've heard a lot of hallway conversations certainly that not all IPOs have that corporate, "Let's go. Let's go public." So we'll see. I'm very psyched for this market and again, we're yet going to see the innovation.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, it's interesting. We were talking yesterday with a number of people about Databricks. Do they go, or do they stay, or do they go? Market's open. Another super strong opening today, so we're seeing that. But given that this is Crypto Trailblazers, Ethereum finally broke through its previous high of roughly 4,600. It hit 4,700 earlier today. It's interesting, John, because the historical pattern, as you know, has always been when Bitcoin hits new highs, Ethereum hits new highs and that didn't happen this time around. Bitcoin went up north of 120,000 and Ethereum was stuck below its previous high of 4,600 and now, it's broken through that, so that could be a sign. Anybody who listened to your interview with Tom Lee a couple of weeks ago saw that coming. I know a lot of people who said, "I saw that interview and I bought more ETH." And they're like, "Yeah. Well, that's probably a good move. To your point about the GENIUS Act and eventually the Clarity Act, the rails don't have a lot of friction right now.>> Well, I was talking with the EZ Lab folks that's Binance Labs. I mentioned that earlier. They have a huge fund. 12 people doing all kinds of incubation and one of the things that came up was obviously the convergence of gen AI and blockchain, but we were commenting and I'd love to get your reaction to this, because remember back in 2015, between 2015 and 2018, I'd say 2018 is when the market started to go sideways on blockchain. We saw that. There was a thirst for alpha entrepreneurs. When I say alpha entrepreneurs, I mean hardcore nerds were all over it. If you look at the AI market, most of the top players in gen AI are basically former Bitcoin miners. So you saw the Bitcoin mining business buying all the GPUs, getting all the energy and they were mining Bitcoin and doing crypto. But then during that phase where there was a lot of blockchain development, you had real engineering going on. Okay. Fast-forward to today, yeah, 2018 to say 2023, 24, that market, NFTs and all that stuff happened. Then now we're starting to see a surge of that kind of engineer. Is was in Palo Alto for the last Crypto Trailblazers. The Stanford crypto group came in. There's some real freaking good, great projects going on like really financeable VC ventures on L1 chains, L2 chains and the thought that everyone will have a chain is interesting, so you start to see more. And even it's rumored and it's a public secret that both Circle and Stripe are building L1 blockchains. And so there could be a scenario where there's millions of blockchains out there. And there's a botched upgrade in Ethereum. That price could crater. Remember, the Ethereum was doing great and then performance problems. Now they've fixed it, but what happens next?
Dave Vellante
>> And that led to the ascendancy of Solana as an example.>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> .>> So you start to see this IT dynamic where upgrading the network, upgrading the capabilities introduces risk. I think that's going to be an opportunity for companies building stable networks. We had a company in yesterday who they're all nerds, they're all techies. They're like, "We're all engineers. We're building the best infrastructure as a one-stop shop." And so you're starting to see that alpha entrepreneurial engineering mindset come into these blockchain deals and I think that's one sign. And the second sign is the money's coming in, so you've got money and engineering coming together.
Dave Vellante
>> And we heard yesterday from Sergey from Chainlink Labs. He, I thought, did a really good job of laying out the premise for Ethereum and the utility of that blockchain. Yeah. He really depositioned Bitcoin. He said, "Bitcoin, you're competing for the TAM of gold." I don't agree with that. I think there is incremental TAM there, but maybe eventually, it's the same TAM as .>> Anton Katz from Talos, I interviewed him. They built a platform for institutional trading and digital management of assets. It's basically a tech platform with observability and data and all that stuff.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. So you're making the point that I wanted to share is that so Bitcoin as we know is not programmable, but Solidity is the programming language for Ethereum and that spawned all this innovation. We know it goes back to 2017 and we had an Ethereum winter, if you will, after the big spike in 2021. But the point is all that innovation is now hitting the market combined with the new administration's new posture on crypto and that's like a perfect storm. And the pent-up demand for IPOs, it's like a perfect storm for growth and->> Again, that's why I liken it to the cloud wave. Not that it's a direct metaphor or comparable, but the same trajectory of economics are there in terms of money-making, but the tech trajectory, simple building blocks AWS turns into higher level abstractions. That's cloud. Go to crypto, you got L1, L2 and now you're starting to see that become the core and then I think there's going to be tons of building around it on top of it and obviously, it's decentralized, so it's a whole nother ballgame. And the money's there.
Dave Vellante
>> And the finer point here is essentially, we're talking about building a new internet and it's going to start with financial infrastructure, which is the most important infrastructure on the planet, and then that'll span out to other capabilities, certainly when things get tokenized. But the original premise, again, behind this whole area beyond Satoshi and the whole crash in 2007, 2008, the other piece of that is if you think about the internet, you know this, John, you were there during the building of the internet, HTTP, SMTP, all the internet protocols, basically, they were created by either academia or the government. They've been co-opted by the big internet giants and so they own the internet. And so this whole band of nerds, like you call them, serious tech alphas, said, "Hey, we want to basically take back the internet and at the same time, we want to make some money.">> Yeah. The early internet community prior to the web, even the web DNS, all done very community-oriented. Similarity between the internet and blockchain is similar. Again, community and consensus that drives this ecosystem, so I think it's going to be similar and I think that has to maintain. If it loses the purity of that community and the consensus, decision-making and nails the performance, I think it'll scale like the internet did.
Dave Vellante
>> The difference is you couldn't invest in the LAMP stack, which essentially built the internet. If you wanted to invest in Linux, you had to wait until Red Hat did an IPO. But with ICOs and crypto, anybody can get in and get a piece of the action. And that's why it was always, I thought, very alluring for the mainstream retail investor, even though we know there's been some scams, a lot of people lost some money and Sam Bankman-Fried and some other scams, but hey, a lot of scams in hard dollars as well.>> Yeah. And in five years, we're going to be talking about observability.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. Yeah. .>> containers. The global footprint's key too. I think if you look at Solana that's outside the United States, this is a global phenomenon. The US sovereignty's going to come into it. AI and crypto markets are converging. Similar cultures from an innovation standpoint. Different cultures from a "community" standpoint. Obviously, gen AI's fast-moving. A lot of land grabbing going on, but I think blockchain and crypto specifically, it's going to be a build out, because without the plumbing on the financial side, I don't think will hit as hard. And if you look at all the successful IPOs, they all have a financial bend to it in the sense of they're serving product market fit for managing things that the GENIUS Act enables, Clarity Act enables. How do you get the policies? How do you regulate this stuff? Checking those boxes, absolutely critical, so we'll see what happens.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, and I was in a Reddit thread recently and they were talking about, yeah, they're basically laying down the premise for tokenizing and the whole crypto premise of being able to make instantaneous money movement globally. And people were saying, "Well, wait a minute, what about Zelle?" Okay. And these other examples. Okay. That may be true, but they're confined to smaller networks. Certainly international networks or within that international realm. But the other point is as you tokenize other assets, whether it's art or stocks or vehicles or real estate or whatever it is, you'll be able to trade those in a facile manner->> And I think-...
Dave Vellante
>> without all that overhead.... >> the Zelle example's a good one, because that's what makes the banks have an appetite for crypto, because unlike traditional centralized banking where databases are involved, you got tokenization of assets, you get assets on chain, you've got immutability, decentralization.
Dave Vellante
>> But with Zelle, you don't have smart contracts.>> You don't have .
Dave Vellante
>> You don't have transparency and visibility on the blockchain.>> It's not decentralized.
Dave Vellante
>> So it's a whole another thing, so it's not decentralized. Right. Yes, you can make a quick trade .>> All right. So bottom line, what's your summary of unpacking the Bullish IPO here today as they rang the bell here at the NYSE?
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I'm really interested to see what the action does here and how it compares to some of the other offerings that we've seen and how it compares to some of the valuations of the competitors, but I think, John, as the saying goes, the trend is your friend. And right now, the trend is a tailwind for IPOs generally in crypto specifically, so I'm bullish. I do think they've got to prove out the hybrid business model and I think they have to demonstrate that they can differentiate and get those institutions to be sticky and that remains to be seen.>> Well, I'm psyched to see the IPO window open. We're sitting on top of the trading floor here. On the opposite behind us, we're seeing the calls and the puts. AMD's at the top. You're starting to see CoreWeave. They had a little bit of a bump this morning. Tesla's always there, NVIDIA. But active market here today. Very volatile on the options side. Looking good on the main market.
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of energy in .>> A lot of energy here at the New York Stock Exchange. It's theCUBE inside theCUBE NYSE and the NYSE Wired Crypto Trailblazers program. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage featuring the leaders in crypto and what a better way to celebrate that series and have an actual crypto IPO happen here at the NYSE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.
>> Hello. Welcome to theCUBE. We are here at the New York Stock Exchange in our East Coast studio. Of course, we've got Palo Alto connecting SiliconANGLE, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. It's like a special CUBE pod edition IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Bullish. Just rang the opening bell. Dave, we've been covering crypto since 2011. I did a little ChatGPT that said, "Hey, how long have been covering crypto?" I couldn't remember those first stories, the whole claims. Craig Wright, Satoshi to all the dark web -
Dave Vellante
>> .... >> underbelly of Bitcoin.
Dave Vellante
>> Of course.>> Yeah. Certainly unpacking the Bullish IPO on the NYSE is worthy, because we've been covering crypto and more recently, just the rise of the mainstreaming of crypto. We're seeing a lot more legitimate blockchain layer one, layer two businesses on top of this. You see the financial markets and the institutions picking it up. ETFs are out there. You're starting to see Ethereum skyrocket in price. We had Tom Lee on. We've talked to the founder of Ethereum over the years. It is a rise of the crypto ecosystem. Looks a lot like cloud computing. It's got a lot of scale involved. A lot of money's involved with the-
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of innovation, tech.>> Just so much going on, so let's kick it off. We just saw the opening bell. I got a nice one-minute clip of the opening bell. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of activity. Packed balcony. Of course, we're overlooking the floor here and of course, the NYSE Wired Crypto Trailblazer series going on this week that we're hosting, highlighting a lot of the leaders of future IPOs and the people making it happen. It's money making day meets technology. It's really amazing to see the IPO market open up and NYSE is becoming the place for crypto companies. It's iconic. It's globally recognized. People have an affinity to ringing the opening bell and being at the NYSE and of course, the media coverage coming out of here is phenomenal. And of course, we're here in the Buttonwood podium room. The NYSE Wired community's growing. You starting to see the appetite with the GENIUS Act, the Clarity Act. We covered that on our last podcast. The market is opening up big time.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I don't think these guys are going to get quite the reaction that Circle got or Figma, but it's legit. It's about a $5 billion plus valuation for this company. The background is they were founded in 2021. They were trying to do a SPAC at the height of the crypto boom and then in 2022 they said, "No. That's not going to work," so they merged with Tom Farley's company. He was the former president of the NYSE, so he's got the institutional chops and that's what these guys are all about. They've got this hybrid business model that combines centralized finance with decentralized finance, so that bring the best of both worlds. Centralized brings control and regulatory compliance. The decentralized allows you to participate in the DeFi economy, bringing in apps and all the innovation that's there. So it's an interesting model. Looking at the revenue numbers, John, it's quite amazing. In 2022 they did 73 million and then 2023, they boomed to 300 million and then last year, did 153 million. And that was due to market volatility when crypto tanked, so their trading volumes dropped and then their net income went from 29 million to 150 million, down to 10 million for the year. And then Q2 2025 is projected to be in 100 million range, so you see quite a lot of volatility in this company.>> And they're raising over a billion dollars. 30 million shares offered. I love the name, Bullish. It totally is a bull market. They got a bull in the lobby from the Circle IPO here. Obviously, the bull in Manhattan, Wall Street represents bull market. Clearly bullish on crypto and I think what's interesting about the centralized, decentralized aspect, it's also a data play. We've had many people on theCUBE just yesterday in our series and other Crypto Trailblazers, where getting data, you have a lot of these finance guys and who have institutional background and chops, as you say. They get the data game, so centralized meets decentralized. Certainly, data's going to be big, have an exchange. Of course, Bullish also acquired CoinDesk, which is a media company, so they have their own media arm. So very interesting company. Again, with Circle, it's a huge tailwind for cryptos. I think it's a good call to go out. They came out on the high end, the range. They were originally expected to be between 32 and 33. They're opening up at 37. We'll wait to see what happens with the pop or not. We'll see. It's going to be very interesting.
Dave Vellante
>> So to your point about CoinDesk, so they now have got a media arm. And I think they bought them for 70 million or so, so it was relatively short money, but the premise there is they will pull in audience that will want to trade. So we'll see if that happens, but Peter Thiel's backing them. A couple of hedge fund managers as well. The names included in the raise, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, Citi, BlackRock and Arc. So that's showing quite a bit of interest, but like I said, probably going to be somewhat more subdued than the Circle and Figma IPOs I would think.>> Yeah. And we saw CNBC has a story already talking about BitGo and then crypto exchange, Gemini also filed confidentially to go public. So the IPO window, not just for crypto. We had the former Binance Labs folks called A-Labs in here yesterday talking to us about how gen AI and crypto coming together is enabling a lot more assets on chain, whether it's bio or finance. This data game is real. I think I like this market, because it feels a lot like the cloud computing market in the early 2013 timeframe when Amazon really started to get the momentum going. You saw the basic building blocks exist. You start to see abstractions. You start to see software innovations. Obviously, the SaaS wave hit and then large scale ramp happened, so you're starting to see the formation of these crypto companies, Dave. I'd love to get your thoughts on this, because the unit economics still, in my opinion, have yet to be realized. Yeah. There's some money making going on and there are big numbers, but the headroom, if the digital asset market crosses over, you will see massive innovation in terms of new use cases and I think that's what gets my attention, especially with the institutional pickup. You're starting to see real money systems, the plumbing really adopt what's going on here. So I am very bullish. In this case, Bullish going public just on crypto, because it is inevitable that digital assets, the digital currency has to be that and of course, stable coins grounds everything with that, so again, part of the coverage is there with us, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, you're bullish, no pun intended, but pun intended, I guess. And I think to your point, there's a lot of competition in this space, which actually is an indicator of the market potential. Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap are all pretty well-established competitors that Bullish is going to face. Their differentiation is going to be going after institutional investors or institutions and building that world-class infrastructure. That's going to be their differentiator. They're not necessarily trying to go after the broader consumer market. It's really those institutions that they're trying to target. And so it's going to be interesting to see when this thing actually goes. We should explain how IPOs work here versus the NASDAQ in the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ rather. They go out at a certain time. And whatever time that is, whether the demand and supply are out of balance, doesn't matter. They go out 11:30, 12:00, 1 o'clock, whatever they've decided. Here, it's different. They actually have a market maker who says, "Let's test it. Let's game it. Let's do what ifs. What if the price is 37? What if the price is 38? What if the price is 40? What's the demand?" And they do the supply and demand and they talk to the bankers and then at some point the bankers say, "Okay. The supply and demand looks good. Maybe it'll get the pop that we want, but not too much pop. Whatever. Let's go." And that's how they pick the time. You've seen it in action. You go down to the kiosk and you can see it in real time.~>> And they bring that other bell and they make that first trade.
Dave Vellante
>> Right. Right. It's a very exciting moment.>> .
Dave Vellante
>> And so it's an homage to the throwback days of when they actually had real trading, humans trading on the floor. I guess the point there is that it's going to be interesting to see how Bullish, in their valuation, their multiples compare to some of this other more established competition. Again, they're in a very, very competitive market, but they've got some significant differentiators. It just, I think, takes more time for them to bake into the institutional market .>> Yeah. Yeah. I think what David Sacks has done with the GENIUS Act, I posted on LinkedIn yesterday, the GENIUS Act is a gift to the market. I think it's opened up a lot of opportunities and I think with the previous regime under the Biden administration and the SEC specifically, everyone had to flee the jurisdiction, if you will, the US, to go international. And I think you're going to see companies that have been bunkering in outside the United States come back in and go public, because there's real numbers behind some of these crypto companies. It's not like pump and dump schemes that you've seen with the coins. You're seeing real businesses, real crypto retail, real institutional. You're starting to see a lot more business models kicking in, so there's real mechanics in these businesses that are driving revenue. And certainly, the staking of the coins between Bitcoin and Ethereum is really huge, so I think that's going to be a big deal. So I think we'll see more IPOs come. I think the window's open right now and I think it probably will be for some time, unless someone takes a dip, lays an egg on an IPO. Then that might scare people, but right now, I think you're going to see people come out of the gate that have been doing business. Now, the question is do they have the IPO readiness? We've heard a lot of hallway conversations certainly that not all IPOs have that corporate, "Let's go. Let's go public." So we'll see. I'm very psyched for this market and again, we're yet going to see the innovation.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, it's interesting. We were talking yesterday with a number of people about Databricks. Do they go, or do they stay, or do they go? Market's open. Another super strong opening today, so we're seeing that. But given that this is Crypto Trailblazers, Ethereum finally broke through its previous high of roughly 4,600. It hit 4,700 earlier today. It's interesting, John, because the historical pattern, as you know, has always been when Bitcoin hits new highs, Ethereum hits new highs and that didn't happen this time around. Bitcoin went up north of 120,000 and Ethereum was stuck below its previous high of 4,600 and now, it's broken through that, so that could be a sign. Anybody who listened to your interview with Tom Lee a couple of weeks ago saw that coming. I know a lot of people who said, "I saw that interview and I bought more ETH." And they're like, "Yeah. Well, that's probably a good move. To your point about the GENIUS Act and eventually the Clarity Act, the rails don't have a lot of friction right now.>> Well, I was talking with the EZ Lab folks that's Binance Labs. I mentioned that earlier. They have a huge fund. 12 people doing all kinds of incubation and one of the things that came up was obviously the convergence of gen AI and blockchain, but we were commenting and I'd love to get your reaction to this, because remember back in 2015, between 2015 and 2018, I'd say 2018 is when the market started to go sideways on blockchain. We saw that. There was a thirst for alpha entrepreneurs. When I say alpha entrepreneurs, I mean hardcore nerds were all over it. If you look at the AI market, most of the top players in gen AI are basically former Bitcoin miners. So you saw the Bitcoin mining business buying all the GPUs, getting all the energy and they were mining Bitcoin and doing crypto. But then during that phase where there was a lot of blockchain development, you had real engineering going on. Okay. Fast-forward to today, yeah, 2018 to say 2023, 24, that market, NFTs and all that stuff happened. Then now we're starting to see a surge of that kind of engineer. Is was in Palo Alto for the last Crypto Trailblazers. The Stanford crypto group came in. There's some real freaking good, great projects going on like really financeable VC ventures on L1 chains, L2 chains and the thought that everyone will have a chain is interesting, so you start to see more. And even it's rumored and it's a public secret that both Circle and Stripe are building L1 blockchains. And so there could be a scenario where there's millions of blockchains out there. And there's a botched upgrade in Ethereum. That price could crater. Remember, the Ethereum was doing great and then performance problems. Now they've fixed it, but what happens next?
Dave Vellante
>> And that led to the ascendancy of Solana as an example.>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> .>> So you start to see this IT dynamic where upgrading the network, upgrading the capabilities introduces risk. I think that's going to be an opportunity for companies building stable networks. We had a company in yesterday who they're all nerds, they're all techies. They're like, "We're all engineers. We're building the best infrastructure as a one-stop shop." And so you're starting to see that alpha entrepreneurial engineering mindset come into these blockchain deals and I think that's one sign. And the second sign is the money's coming in, so you've got money and engineering coming together.
Dave Vellante
>> And we heard yesterday from Sergey from Chainlink Labs. He, I thought, did a really good job of laying out the premise for Ethereum and the utility of that blockchain. Yeah. He really depositioned Bitcoin. He said, "Bitcoin, you're competing for the TAM of gold." I don't agree with that. I think there is incremental TAM there, but maybe eventually, it's the same TAM as .>> Anton Katz from Talos, I interviewed him. They built a platform for institutional trading and digital management of assets. It's basically a tech platform with observability and data and all that stuff.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. So you're making the point that I wanted to share is that so Bitcoin as we know is not programmable, but Solidity is the programming language for Ethereum and that spawned all this innovation. We know it goes back to 2017 and we had an Ethereum winter, if you will, after the big spike in 2021. But the point is all that innovation is now hitting the market combined with the new administration's new posture on crypto and that's like a perfect storm. And the pent-up demand for IPOs, it's like a perfect storm for growth and->> Again, that's why I liken it to the cloud wave. Not that it's a direct metaphor or comparable, but the same trajectory of economics are there in terms of money-making, but the tech trajectory, simple building blocks AWS turns into higher level abstractions. That's cloud. Go to crypto, you got L1, L2 and now you're starting to see that become the core and then I think there's going to be tons of building around it on top of it and obviously, it's decentralized, so it's a whole nother ballgame. And the money's there.
Dave Vellante
>> And the finer point here is essentially, we're talking about building a new internet and it's going to start with financial infrastructure, which is the most important infrastructure on the planet, and then that'll span out to other capabilities, certainly when things get tokenized. But the original premise, again, behind this whole area beyond Satoshi and the whole crash in 2007, 2008, the other piece of that is if you think about the internet, you know this, John, you were there during the building of the internet, HTTP, SMTP, all the internet protocols, basically, they were created by either academia or the government. They've been co-opted by the big internet giants and so they own the internet. And so this whole band of nerds, like you call them, serious tech alphas, said, "Hey, we want to basically take back the internet and at the same time, we want to make some money.">> Yeah. The early internet community prior to the web, even the web DNS, all done very community-oriented. Similarity between the internet and blockchain is similar. Again, community and consensus that drives this ecosystem, so I think it's going to be similar and I think that has to maintain. If it loses the purity of that community and the consensus, decision-making and nails the performance, I think it'll scale like the internet did.
Dave Vellante
>> The difference is you couldn't invest in the LAMP stack, which essentially built the internet. If you wanted to invest in Linux, you had to wait until Red Hat did an IPO. But with ICOs and crypto, anybody can get in and get a piece of the action. And that's why it was always, I thought, very alluring for the mainstream retail investor, even though we know there's been some scams, a lot of people lost some money and Sam Bankman-Fried and some other scams, but hey, a lot of scams in hard dollars as well.>> Yeah. And in five years, we're going to be talking about observability.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah. Yeah. .>> containers. The global footprint's key too. I think if you look at Solana that's outside the United States, this is a global phenomenon. The US sovereignty's going to come into it. AI and crypto markets are converging. Similar cultures from an innovation standpoint. Different cultures from a "community" standpoint. Obviously, gen AI's fast-moving. A lot of land grabbing going on, but I think blockchain and crypto specifically, it's going to be a build out, because without the plumbing on the financial side, I don't think will hit as hard. And if you look at all the successful IPOs, they all have a financial bend to it in the sense of they're serving product market fit for managing things that the GENIUS Act enables, Clarity Act enables. How do you get the policies? How do you regulate this stuff? Checking those boxes, absolutely critical, so we'll see what happens.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, and I was in a Reddit thread recently and they were talking about, yeah, they're basically laying down the premise for tokenizing and the whole crypto premise of being able to make instantaneous money movement globally. And people were saying, "Well, wait a minute, what about Zelle?" Okay. And these other examples. Okay. That may be true, but they're confined to smaller networks. Certainly international networks or within that international realm. But the other point is as you tokenize other assets, whether it's art or stocks or vehicles or real estate or whatever it is, you'll be able to trade those in a facile manner->> And I think-...
Dave Vellante
>> without all that overhead.... >> the Zelle example's a good one, because that's what makes the banks have an appetite for crypto, because unlike traditional centralized banking where databases are involved, you got tokenization of assets, you get assets on chain, you've got immutability, decentralization.
Dave Vellante
>> But with Zelle, you don't have smart contracts.>> You don't have .
Dave Vellante
>> You don't have transparency and visibility on the blockchain.>> It's not decentralized.
Dave Vellante
>> So it's a whole another thing, so it's not decentralized. Right. Yes, you can make a quick trade .>> All right. So bottom line, what's your summary of unpacking the Bullish IPO here today as they rang the bell here at the NYSE?
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I'm really interested to see what the action does here and how it compares to some of the other offerings that we've seen and how it compares to some of the valuations of the competitors, but I think, John, as the saying goes, the trend is your friend. And right now, the trend is a tailwind for IPOs generally in crypto specifically, so I'm bullish. I do think they've got to prove out the hybrid business model and I think they have to demonstrate that they can differentiate and get those institutions to be sticky and that remains to be seen.>> Well, I'm psyched to see the IPO window open. We're sitting on top of the trading floor here. On the opposite behind us, we're seeing the calls and the puts. AMD's at the top. You're starting to see CoreWeave. They had a little bit of a bump this morning. Tesla's always there, NVIDIA. But active market here today. Very volatile on the options side. Looking good on the main market.
Dave Vellante
>> A lot of energy in .>> A lot of energy here at the New York Stock Exchange. It's theCUBE inside theCUBE NYSE and the NYSE Wired Crypto Trailblazers program. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage featuring the leaders in crypto and what a better way to celebrate that series and have an actual crypto IPO happen here at the NYSE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.
