Bullish Ordinary Shares

you for standing by at this time i would like to welcome everyone to the bullish global fourth quarter 2025 earnings call and q a all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise after the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer session today's q a will be limited to one question if you would like to ask a question during this time simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad if you would like to withdraw your question Press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Michael Fideli, Vice President of Finance. You may begin.

Good morning, and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. I'm Michael Fideli, 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 could 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. A reconciliation of these metrics 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.

Tom Farrelly, Thanks Michael thanks everyone for joining our call and good morning, it is great to be with you i'm Tom farley chairman and CEO bullish we have a lot to cover today. Tom Farrelly, We close 2025 with strong momentum and have continued to execute on the vision we laid out during our IPO process and in the subsequent quarters. Tom Farrelly, We focus on serving institutions and we're winning a wave of institutional business in the US and globally. The next wave of digital assets growth is taking shape in the form of tokenization of real-world assets and the institutional adoption of blockchain technology. I believe this will be a huge 20-year-long institutional flood powered by Bullish's purpose-built offerings. In 2025, we executed on our core objectives. We captured the first wave of traditional finance institutions flowing into the digital asset space. We scaled our liquidity services into an indispensable tokenization offering for issuers of stablecoins and other digital assets. We launched options trading in Q4 and scaled rapidly in terms of our market position. We locked down our Tier 1 licenses, including the New York Bit license, MECA in Europe, and additional authorizations from Hong Kong's SFC and Germany's Boston. and we achieved the key milestone of entering the public markets. We executed on a strong fourth quarter financially as well. We earned record SSNO revenue of $54.6 million, an increase of 284% year over year, and our adjusted EBITDA was $44.5 million, an increase of 55% from the prior quarter and 181% from the same period in the preceding year. While 2025 was a great year, I'm even more excited for 2026. For several years now, Bullish has intentionally positioned ourselves at the intersection of three strong ongoing trends that are driving digital assets evolution. Trend one is that increasing regulatory clarity is requiring infrastructure businesses like Bullish and their customers to operate in a compliant and responsible fashion. Trend two is that the number of traditional finance institutions operating in digital assets is increasing dramatically. And trend three is that tokenization use cases are expanding exponentially, including for major asset classes on the back of the successful tokenization of the U.S. dollar via stablecoins. These trends happen sequentially. And now they're happening all at once, with each trend reinforcing the momentum of the others. we're hitting this inflection point here in 2026. In 2026, we are laser focused on our top three priorities that position us at the intersection of these trends. First, we will continue our exceptional growth in our exchange, prioritizing growth in the regulated institutional derivatives market, as well as building our US presence for all products. Second, We will further establish ourselves as a clear market leader in successful tokenization of real-world assets by scaling our liquidity services offering and widening our tokenization services and global regulatory footprint to meet the market's needs. And third, we will accelerate our already market-leading positions in the digital assets indices and insight spaces. While the last four months have seen digital asset prices drop precipitously, Our business continues to grow, and we were built to take advantage of opportunities created by volatility in bear markets as well. In fact, we believe that this current malaise will present promising opportunities to grow bullish organically, as well as through M&A. We are more convicted than ever that our institutional positioning is the right approach at the right time. The next big leg of digital assets growth will be driven by institutional adoption. During tough times like these, our strong balance sheet and solid reputation positions us to bring on institutional clients that other less reputable or less capitalized firms simply cannot. In summary, we expect that Bullish can and will thrive in 2026 despite a rough macro beginning to the year for our industry. Shifting to the business update, in the fourth quarter, And sequentially, over each month of 2025, we hit all-time highs in monthly active customers and set records for total customer funds on platform and open interest for PERPs and options. The growth of active trading clients on our platform is accelerating around the world. In Europe, Asia, and the United States, we are seeing a wave of institutions onboarding that include notable broker-dealers, divisions of commercial banks, and the world's largest digital assets electronic communications network, for example, among others. The launch of Options has attracted a whole new set of institutional clients onto our platform. These new customers are now initiating trades across our Spot and Perps products as well. Honing in on the Options launch, we went live on October 29th, and the uptake in volumes and open interest has been remarkable over just about three months. By the end of the quarter, we were over $2 billion in open interest. And earlier this year, we hit a high of more than $4 billion of open interest, as well as reaching a high of 29% volume market share. We are now the clear number two Bitcoin options platform by open interest globally. The launch phase of our option strategy is complete. We are now focused on continuing to gain share and aspire to be the options trading market leader. Our tight spreads and one global order book continue to resonate with clients and set us apart from the competition. Our singular order book allows our institutional clients to cross margin their spot futures and options positions in real time, and also to access deep liquidity. We have reacted to client demand and are proud of the progress we have made in the short time since launching. We're also continuing to add to our regulatory toolkit. We're now registered to act as a transfer agent, and we're actively exploring other licenses, including DCO, DCM, broker dealer, and ATS licenses in the United States to help enhance our positioning in the multi-year tokenization megatrend. The ability to gain broad regulatory access throughout the world is a feature of our business model that we believe is rare in our industry and is only becoming more important over time. We intend to list tokenized securities here in 2026, and we're working with the market and regulators to successfully execute on this objective. We look forward to keeping everyone updated on progress throughout the year. Speaking of tokenization, our liquidity services business continues to find new use cases and deliver exceptional value to our partners. We believe the service is tailor-made for tokenization. and we are increasingly seeing demand from asset issuers tokenizing real-world assets. To take a step back, imagine you're a tokenized asset issuer. To launch that token, you'd need to design the token, write the smart contract code, possibly perform KYC and AML and hold a whitelist, and finally tabulate ownership. The good news is that you've tokenized your asset. The bad news is that that was the easy part. For your token to truly be a success, there are several value-added services that you still require. First, you must get the token listed. The listing is typically on regulated and unregulated venues. Second, you must ensure a two-sided marketplace with ample liquidity to allow for efficient trading. Third, you must ensure that the token is being marketed properly and is amply visible to the broader market. High-caliber assets also tend to have research reports. Research analysts, not dissimilar from many of our friends here on this call, help investors better understand the asset, its value proposition, and its potential. Bullish is now powering our partners' growth with the listing, liquidity, marketing, and now research that they need to maximize their success. These value-added services are required both for tokenization of real-world assets, such as dollars in the form of stablecoins, as well as tokenization of other financial market products. We remain exceptionally pleased with the growth of liquidity services for all of these types of customers. In Q4, we added IOTA, VeChain, Paxos, and Midnight. We've also added Canton, the token for the real world asset focus chain. And earlier this year, USDAI, the first decentralized credit protocol that connects stablecoin liquidity directly to real world compute cash flows looking ahead our pipeline remains strong we continue with a rapid new listing pace expecting to list five new partner assets including fidelity's new stablecoin in this week alone when major financial institutions stablecoin issuers and other digital asset clients choose a partner for liquidity services they gravitate to bullish because we are the only solution of its kind in the market offering listing, liquidity, marketing, and research. Shifting gears to our information services business, CoinDesk Indices completed a breakout year. We served as benchmark data provider for 30 different single token ETFs launched in 2025 and were especially dominant in the fourth quarter, listing 15 of the 39 new digital asset ETFs brought to market. We're winning mandates from top tier issuers like ARK and ProShares, and we're well positioned to win license agreements for upcoming single token ETFs from other major traditional finance players. Next week, we expect Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, to launch a series of futures benchmarked to our CoinDesk indices. This includes cash settled futures tracking the CoinDesk 20, CoinDesk 5, and five single token indices, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and we believe the first regulated exposure to BNB in the U.S. markets. This partnership will better help us integrate our leading digital assets capabilities with ICE's traditional finance customers. On the insights side, CoinDesk Insights is among the most recognized brands in the digital assets space, and we've continued to leverage this notoriety to better cross-sell our top customers and drive our flywheel of organic revenue growth across all layers of our business. Our research solutions are also growing since the Q3 2025 launch, and we have had nine distinct customers pay for our research in the fourth quarter alone, our first full quarter of offering this service. I'm also excited to quickly touch on Consensus Hong Kong due to occur next week. The lineup is terrific. The exhibition floor is packed Enthusiasm around the event is sky high. We have over 300 side events around Hong Kong, and we have several notable Hong Kong officials, including Honorable John Casey Lee, the chief executive of all of Hong Kong, and key partnerships with Solana and Salt. We see this event as an opportunity to drive additional business to bullish and believe it will serve as an accelerant for our sales pipeline in Asia. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave to discuss our financial performance and business drivers.