Block.One Invests $10BN In New Subsidiary

The subsidiary Bullish Global is set to release a cryptocurrency exchange before the end of the year

Thiel-backed blockchain software company, Block.one, yesterday unveiled Bullish Global, its subsidiary firm backed by $10 billion funding in digital assets and cash.  Bullish Global will run as an independent child company, focusing its effort on launching a new crypto exchange named Bullish.

Block.one, the founder of the public blockchain EOSIO, confirmed it had landed funding worth $10 billion to facilitate the project. Several individuals and institutions contributed to the sum, among them billionaire technopreneur Peter Thiel, Howard, Bacon, Richard Li, Christian Angermayer, Japan-based investment firm Nomura, and Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital.

The deal also specified that Howard, Thiel, Angermayer, and Li would assume senior advisory roles in the company.

The funding includes an initial investment from Block.one in the form of $100 million in cash, 164,000 Bitcoins translating to around $9.7 billion, and $20 million EOS tokens. The company’s statement revealed that the investment was supplemented by an external strategic funding round that raised $300 million.

The crypto exchange, set to launch later this year, will offer lending, portfolio management, and market-making services to investors. This will be achieved through a decentralised finance app and wouldn’t require the intermediary services provided by banks.

The press release published yesterday described the upcoming bullish exchange as a “blockchain-based cryptocurrency exchange designed to combine the performance, user privacy, and compliance offered by central order book technology with the vertically integrated user benefits of decentralized finance (DeFi) market architecture.”

The release also noted that it would leverage the EOSIO blockchain to track all the transactions. The news comes one month after Coinbase went public following a listing on NASDAQ. Block.one completed the largest ever recorded initial coin offering of $4 billion for its blockchain back in 2018. The achievement was even more remarkable considering it didn’t have a live product at the time.

A year after raising the sum, Block.com had to pay $24 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle claims of carrying out an unregistered ICO.

EOS price reacted to the development by rallying close to 50% and north of $12.78 when the news broke out. The EOS token is currently trading at $13.19, up 39.71% in the last 24 hours per CoinMarketCap data.