Bullish Ordinary Shares

Good morning and thank you for standing by. My name is John and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Bullish Global Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed and mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, simply press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Fidelix, VP of Finance, Please go ahead. Good morning.

Welcome to our third quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fedele, Vice President of Finance, and I'm joined on today's call by our Chief Executive Officer, Tom Farley, Chief Financial Officer, David Bonanno, and Director of Corporate Development, Liam Foley. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including those relating to our expected performance and business opportunities. These statements are not assurances of future performance. They are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results differ materially. For more details on these risks, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings, including our prospectus dated August 12, 2025. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. This call will also include a discussion of non-IFRS financial measures for reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings press release and presentation, which also contain additional information regarding non-IFRS financial measures and key performance indicators. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Michael. Thank you all for joining our call today. I'm Tom Farley, the Chairman and CEO of Bullish. We're pleased to share that Bullish continues to win for Q3 2025 Bullish reported record adjusted revenue of 76.5 million, record adjusted EBITDA of 28.6 million, and record adjusted net income of 13.8 million. As Dave will discuss here shortly and can be seen from the provided guidance, we expect more records coming for 2025 as a whole. In the last six weeks, our momentum has only increased On October 31st, we fully launched our options franchise and the early results are encouraging. We also launched our U.S. exchange business and have onboarded marquee customers in the early days. We have signed up many new liquidity services customers here in Q4, including high-profile crypto projects. Our index business is gaining traction with many launches of U.S.-based ETFs and other listed products tied to our benchmarks. our media business growth has accelerated in Q4, now registering in our weekly and monthly reports as the top crypto news site globally measured by views. I will now share some context on where Bullish sits within the broader crypto ecosystem before moving on to discuss our business successes in greater depth. For several years now, Bullish has intentionally positioned ourselves at the intersection of three strong ongoing trends that are driving crypto evolution. One, increasing regulatory clarity with regulations that require infrastructure businesses and their customers to operate in a compliant and responsible fashion. Two, increasing numbers of traditional finance institutions operating in crypto in meaningful ways. And three, growing tokenization of major asset classes on the back of the successful tokenization of the US dollar via stable coins. We are more convinced than ever that we are on the right path. We are squarely positioned at the center of each of these trends. We are proud of our regulatory footprint and are pleased with the ongoing institutional adoption that we are helping to drive. However, I'd like to expand on this third trend, Tokenization. Tokenization refers to the process of turning traditional financial assets into crypto assets. We believe this trend will be the most transformational crypto value proposition of the next decade, and we are positioned to be leaders in this space through our liquidity services platform. In fact, the tokenization trend gave rise to our liquidity services business back in 2023. The first major asset that was successfully tokenized was the U.S. dollar in the form of stablecoins. As dollars were tokenized, stablecoin issuers turned to service providers, such as Bullish, for help to help them tokenize the U.S. dollar. We saw a market need for listings, liquidity, and visibility as these new tokens bridged the chasm from TradFi to blockchain. We spent most of the years 2022, 2023, and 2024 in build mode to meet these needs, and we called the collection of these products liquidity services. Before, tokenization was even the hot word on everyone's lips. Today, for stablecoins, we are writing smart contracts, enabling bridging from one layer one blockchain to another. We are listing stablecoins against many other assets on a compliant and regulated global exchange. We are providing liquidity both on bullish and on DeFi protocols, and we are marketing these stable coins through our consensus and coin desk properties. In short, with our liquidity services offering, we have built a tokenization platform, and it has become our fastest growing business. But that is not what excites us the most. The trend of tokenizing assets other than the U.S. dollar is in the first inning. These tokenization services have the potential to continue scaling meaningfully as more and more assets and asset classes are listed on-chain in the years ahead. This includes substantially every major asset class you can think of. We look at the successful tokenization of the dollar, stablecoins, as a roadmap for the future tokenization of these new asset classes. And as a partner for substantially all dollar and euro-backed stablecoins, we've learned the value of developing a rich set of capabilities specifically suited to helping that asset class tokenize. We continue to evolve our services targeted at stablecoins. For example, Bullish now has direct mint burn capabilities with nearly every stablecoin issuer and also advanced API orchestration tools that allow seamless movement between fiat and stables, powering our partners' growth. We believe that each new asset class will also require incremental asset-specific capabilities alongside our standard offering of the three core services every asset issuer needs to tokenize, listings, liquidity, and visibility. With this additional functionality need in mind, we have submitted an application with the SEC to receive regulatory approval as a transfer agent which will further supplement our tokenization and liquidity services strategy for U.S. securities. We look forward to sharing more of our future plans with you over the months ahead, and we look forward to taking this tokenization journey with you. Now, excitement about our liquidity service platform's potential for future tokenization growth aside, how is it doing right now? Our services continue to be sought after. We're adding new and diversified customers, and our momentum has continued into Q4. In the third quarter, we added a record number of liquidity services partners, and our active partner count is up 100% sequentially. We're on track for another strong quarter in Q4. Building on the success of our existing Layer 1 blockchain relationships with market leaders such as Solana, Ripple, and Tron, we have further broadened our layer one blockchain relationships that we are supporting with liquidity services, adding four additional blockchain ecosystems, Canton, Cardano, Midnight, and VeChain to our scope of services since we last spoke. We are also pleased to share that our collaboration with the Solana Foundation continues to develop constructively. In the first quarter of this engagement, Bullish minted more than 80% of our stablecoins on Solana. And Solana's total stablecoin value locked, that is, how many dollars are tokenized on Solana, grew by more than 40% during that quarter. Shifting gears to discuss our very successful options trading launch, I'd like to first take a step back and remind everyone why we are so excited about this opportunity for bullish. Crypto options are the most rapidly growing asset class in the space. They've grown to more than 200 billion in monthly trading volume just last month, up more than 230% from the same period last year. Furthermore, given the complex nature of options, as well as the sophisticated user base, we are well positioned to carve out substantial market share in this asset class. And we expect to see that asset class grow by multiples in the coming years. Turning to the specifics of our own progress, our exchange launched in full and without risk caps at the tail end of October. In just over two weeks, we already traded well over $1 billion of volume, and as of today, we have approximately $1 billion in open interest. Our best day was yesterday, where we traded $240 million, about 4% market share by our definitions. I'm really excited by the traction we've attained right out of the gate, and I expect it to become a significant contributor to our financial performance going forward. Look, I've been involved with a lot of these derivatives launches over the years, including very successful ones and a few that I'd rather not discuss. This one has all the hallmarks of a big winner. Our last earnings call occurred less than 24 hours after we received our prestigious bit list. We indicated that receipt of this license marked the final step in enabling U.S. onboarding for prospective bullish exchange clientele. We also shared that it will take time for these U.S.-based customers to go live, given their institutional nature and the typical lengthy onboarding process for these types of customers. But with all that said, we are pleased to share that we've already actively onboarded many new customers, including very retail brokers, with millions of customers like Webull and Moomoo, institutional brokers such as Kenner Fitzgerald, a very large crypto custodian, and other institutional clients. So things are progressing more quickly than we anticipated just a couple months ago when we last gathered. Our U.S.-based clientele value our already liquid global order book, which helped us launch without any zero-to-one or cold-start liquidity problems. We are encouraged by our early progress in the US and look forward to continuing to seize market share in the months to come. Outside of the United States, we continue to make steady progress growing our exchange. During the quarter, we've added some of the largest retail brokerages in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and integrated various crypto-focused hedge funds or asset managers that have already started trading derivatives on our platform. Shifting to information services, our CoinDesk business continues to perform well, supported by significant accomplishments in our indices business. We are pleased to share that since our last earnings call just two months ago, our indices have underpinned an additional five of six total newly launched U.S.-based exchange-traded crypto products, as well as four additional global ETPs. During this span, we also won six new benchmark switches from competitors and have two active ETP filings for the CoinDesk 20 index. On the CoinDesk Insights or media side, we continue to successfully capture more market share against competitors with our market-leading and accessible crypto content, and CoinDesk.com continues to be a highly sought-after destination for advertising. We have also successfully launched coin best research a subscription based vertical dedicated to delivering high quality research and analysis coin best research also serves as a natural extension and upsell to our liquidity services clientele. That thesis that we can land and expand is proving to be true. There are many examples of existing customers in Q3 and so far in Q4 choosing to take advantage of new Bullish company products and services in addition to their existing products and services. Overall, we continue to win, and we continue to execute on the vision that Dave and I laid out when we first joined Bullish. We're proud of our success to date, and we believe that we're just getting started. We're just getting started on a macro level because tokenization of securities and other real world assets and the shift of financial market infrastructure has only just begun. And we're just getting started today at Bullish generally because we believe we have or are pursuing the right mix of licenses, technology, talent, and experience to be a winner in a world that is rapidly shifting on chain. We will continue to execute with focus, discipline, and momentum as we position bullish for sustained growth in 2026 and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave, our CFO, my partner, to review the quarter in more detail.